“Chicago” (2016-17)
This was my first major foray into abstract painting. I had been interested in abstraction in high school and early in college, but I focused primarily on representational painting for several years after that.
(aside) I actually don’t like the binary of ‘representational’ vs ‘abstract’ painting. They are more similar than different, all painting is abstraction, most abstraction references something, etc … but I digress.
By 2014 and 2015, I was shifting into more gestural figurative/landscape painting, and by 2016 it had become primarily abstract. I was learning how to paint just for painting’s sake, without reliance on photos or references.
My goal here was to capture a sense of light, but without painting a “thing”. I painted intuitively, but didn't want to be too ethereal or fluffy. The key, I found, was that even my abstract paintings always needed to have either a narrative idea* OR some sort of physical impulse behind them. Basically, some form of clarity about what I was making.
Notably, “Chicago” was a few years before my abstract work became explicitly oriented toward social justice. I was grappling with social justice issues outside of this work, and social issues had made their way into my figurative work, but I hadn’t yet connected these concepts to abstract painting.
*I adapted the phrase “narrative idea” directly from Cecily Brown’s “figural idea”. She talks about this, and the abstract/figurative binary, in her interview on The Louisiana Channel.