Leap Painting

The origins of this body of work are from early 2014 when I spent a formative month in residency at Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi. The foundation houses several small exhibit spaces and it was there that I learned of India’s rich tradition of shadow puppetry. Formed of elaborately cut and painted translucent skins, the puppets represent Hindu deities. The intricate edges and shapes resonated, leading me to revisit the poured paint studies I’d been trying out in the studio before my trip. I’d discovered that I was drawn to the natural pigment separations and shapes of the spill on the Mylar’s nonabsorbent surface – the rivulets of paint resembled the contours of the puppet deities’ hands, feet, headdresses, and limbs. But my work has nothing to do with the Hindu religious iconography. My dried paint puddles are up for interpretation, allowing an open-endedness to which I aspire. The spill becomes the spring board for what follows, as well as the central character in a dance. Since then, the work has grown from small drawings/collages on paper to large scale paintings on canvas and aluminum. I create nonrepresentational paintings expressing my kinesthetic experience of the world. The works are not purely abstract, but—like much seemingly nonobjective painting today—an amalgam of the gestural with the precisely representational. Working in an intuitive tradition, I bring in the element of chance at the very beginning. The liquid spill, a pooling pour of paint, is the first mark, and my chosen way of activating space. This piece is actually composed of painting that I did on thin plastic, then cut out and adhered to the base. The finish is slightly translucent so it has the look of encaustic painting.