Daila #3 Print

With this series of paintings I wanted to start with a hard edge showing through all the soft flowing paint. Even though the work looks as if it was spontaneously dribbled, splashed and smeared onto the support, I spent a lot of time deciding how I would break into and over the hard edged background. “Daila #3” as with all of the works in this series of paintings, carries to the forefront, in the finished artwork, the performance that is the very making of the painting itself. Gesture painting is a way to bring the act of painting into the work itself is also called action painting and abstract expressionism. Action painting is a direct impulsive and decidedly forceful type of painting that employs a spur-of-the-moment application of strong, all-encompassing brushstrokes and the happenstance results of dripping and spilling paint onto the support. The term “action-painting” was first used by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to differentiate the art of an assemblage of American Abstract Expressionists who used that process starting in about 1950. Action painting, also called gesture painting, is set apart from the cautiously defined paintings of the “abstract imagists” and “color-field” painters, which represents the other key track contained in Abstract Expressionism and resembles Action painting only in its complete fidelity to unregulated individual expression free of all conventional artistic and shared aesthetic principles. Action painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov echo the sway of the “automatic” techniques first used by the Surrealists in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Surrealist automatism, which was made up of writings and doodles created devoid of the artist’s conscious effort, was principally intended to stimulate unconscious links in the observer, the automatic style of the American Action painters was chiefly intended to be a method of toward opening the artist’s intuitive imaginative powers, giving them liberty to participate without restraint. In Action painting the finished work represented the process the artist used as much as the final product itself. This is an original acrylic painting by Chas Krstich, ChasSK