| Home | Oil Paintings | Gouache on Paper | Thoughts About Painting |
| Exhibition | Resume | Links | |
|
A View into Abstract Painting
These paintings are representative of my mid-career work from the 1980’s through the 1990’s when I was living in New York City. They are a culmination of intense study of abstraction with an emphasis on color and the spatial relationships of forms. They represent figure/ground communication at its basic level and paint at its most materiality. The expression in these paintings is a fictional investigation, an adventure, into the unknown. In this phase of my work, I concentrated on geometric shapes in order to pare down any illusion to references from the external world. This allowed me to work with pure color and light for their own emotional references within a painterly vocabulary. The result is a distillation of a perceived reality which evolves in time and is experienced during the time of painting. The struggle was to make an individual statement or identity within the context of a painterly expression. The complex layers of paint were applied over several months of exploration into the relationships of the forms. The paintings take on an internal perspective and a sense of their own reality. In feeling my way towards the forms that developed, I didn’t efface the tracesof the alterations which ultimately became the remains of experienced time. I was fascinated with the dematerializing energy of light and it’s contrast to the opaque materiality of paint. The relationships between the forms takes on a dialectical theme with the forms facing off with each other in the painting space, the background aids and abets the process. The agitated brushwork increases the materiality of the forms and heightens the luminosity of the color. The finished painting is a result of a balance or equalibrium but within an on going dialogue. Abstraction is basically a visionary notion; it is an absorption of mind that produces a fictional expression. Meaning in or of the painting is the struggle and the expression that is produced. It is felt and viewed differently by each person. Free association and intuition play a large role in the improvised context of abstract painting. Therefore the content is the sum of all the expressions that have gone into each work. The languages of painting are many and I have explored several before and after this period of work. I found this phase of my painting to be the most absorbing and fullfilling of my career so far and I invite a view of these paintings for the way they are sensed and felt rather than thought about. Rosalind Hodgkins
|