Back to Quotes

 Runners / Landscapes:
Hard-edge Space / Soft-edge Color

Color and space are at the core of Beatrice Findlay’s figurative abstractions. On poetically rendered canvases, her color creates space, and space generates a sense of enormous scale. Using a palette of pight and subdued tones, applied with varying pushstrokes and sensuous layering, the artist has built the spatial definition of each canvas generated by personal experiences of the figure, places she has lived, spacious vistas, or bodies of water. Born from a love of the city and nature, her expressive style, at times Zen in mood, is the painterly means of finding the hidden mystery within visual structures.

Working largely vertically or horizontally, paint is applied through the interplay of solid and sure gestural strokes, confetti-like splashes and delicate, graceful calligraphy. Color seems to dance and leap about on a rich surface, building the image from within moving outward and forming a poad visual field that engulfs the viewer. The primary issue, then, is how does Findlay configure enormous space through color applied so deftly to the canvas?

Findlay sets up a dialogue between the precise geometry of hard edge space, which she then subdues with the lyrical seduction of soft-edge color. Attentive to the placement, arrangement and power of detail— a small figure running, a suggestion of a human form, or the dynamics of collage and paint— the image comes alive when the duality of each component, the right-angular direction and the supple movement of color, comes into synchronicity. What comes to mind is the work of Hans Hofmann who taught that the appearance of the physical world could be reduced to basic geometric forms because we do not see objects but rather are aware of the physical “push/pull” of light, realized through color. Color creates the illusion of volume and space.

With this in mind, the series entitled “Figures in Four Squares,” echoes Hofmann’s theory. Findlay divides the picture into four even squares of various hues. Then she melts their inevitable rigidity by placing a figure that spans each of the squares. Colors spill out from each block and reach beyond their spatial limitations. Planes begin to shift, overlap, converge, and dissolve, becoming a dynamic visual experience where the color field of one area engages the color field of its neighbor. As explained by Hofmann, the illusion of volume from color next to color creates the space that gives Findlay’s paintings its unique character.

In “Two Runners,” the surface is built by pacing two canvases together. Half the image is a luscious blue; the other half is a vipant yellow orange, with gestural marks, depicting two swift human bodies moving in opposite directions, one on each panel. The work is reminiscent of Impressionist landscapes, where nature is seen through a purified lens. With a 21st century sensibility, Findlay fills the canvas with ribbons of color, conveying, in each graceful stroke, the enchanting forces of nature at work seen also through the speed of the runners.

To further explore spatial configurations, Findlay lines up individual canvases near each other, infusing the empty white wall as part of the total vertical image. “Denizen VI” is such a work; oil, acrylic and collage comprise three tall panels. In deep tones, reflective of lower Manhattan, Findlay creates two abstracted figures, forming their bodies with stock market reports from the Wall Street Journal. One figure is on the left and the second spans the middle and right panel. As in all Findlay’s art, it is not the figure that intrigues us, but the sensitive arrangement of forms made real when volume is built through the spatial relationship of color, and in this work, the additional expansion of negative space of the white walls.

In delineating the relationship of color to space and space to color, Findlay communicates the union of the visible with the non-visible. “Hypids,” a term she attributes to her work, strives to unite the structural and illuminating qualities of color and space in her figurative landscapes. Woven with an enigmatic but beautiful sense of surface, Findlay’s experience creates work that melds several artistic theories— abstraction, expression, and impression— in its final form. Consequently, imagination is fueled, as each canvas becomes an open door through which the viewer easily passes, while still being grounded in the security of the present world.

Roberta Carasso, PhD., Critic
Los Angeles, California, 2003