Issy Wilson
Issy Wilson
https://www.instagram.com/iwilson.art/?hl=en
Issy Wilson is a London-based artist originally from Chicago. Her practice is deeply rooted in the natural world, with a focus on drawing, painting, textiles, and research. She gathers inspiration by observing her surroundings from the seemingly mundane to the extraordinary: noticing water stains on pavement and moss in the cracks of city bricks to the breathtaking views of the national parks and ancient forests.
Her work explores the structures of roots, trees, mycelium, lichen, and mosses, examining how they mirror blood vessels, neurons, rivers, and mountains in their search to form strong organic connections. Her art studio has become an ecosystem of its own, with pieces evolving symbiotically.
Materials: ink, tea, emulsion, cheese cloth, acrylic, pea, canvas, pastels.
Ecdysis
ink, tea, and emulsion on canvas, 186x300cm, 2024
Ecdysis detail
Limestone I
ink and emulsion on canvas, 150x250cm, 2024
Limestone II,
ink and emulsion on canvas, 150x150cm, 2024
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Water Lilies painted by Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)
Hughie O'Donoghue
Born in Manchester, Hughie O’Donoghue now lives and works in rural Ireland. O’Donoghue has internationally since 1982 and is considered one of the leading painters of his generation. His work is represented in public collections, including the National Gallery, London, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Arts Council of England. The solo exhibition ‘Hughie O’Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Works from the American Ireland Fund Donation’ was held at IMMA in 2009
Laocoon, 2003
Medium: Oil on linen canvas in 3 panels
Dimensions: Unframed, 305 x 468 cm
O’Donoghue uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, and experience; and draws on history, mythology, and personal records to create works that resonate with emotional intensity.
Fallen Elm (Kilfane) Oil on board, 71 x 122cm (28 x 48") Signed, inscribed and dated 2007/'8 verso
Evening Kilfane, Co. Kilkenny Oil on canvas, 68 x 104cm (26¾ x 41") Signed; signed inscribed and dated 2007 verso
His work is abstract in style, presenting the human body as distorted and blurred forms, drawn in thick and heavy brushstrokes. He often applies numerous layers of paint, or includes photographs or documentary sources within the canvas, covered in more paint.
The surfaces of his canvas are full of texture, in which the material takes paramount importance
This process of layering reflects O'Donoghue's interest in engaging with historical narratives, often personal in nature, so that he can express the serial form of experience and memory.
"painting is archaeology in reverse"
“The colours in my paintings are also intense, but in my work there’s never only one reason for why something is the way it is. I suppose I deliberately court the intensity of colour to mirror the intensity of feeling that comes with memory.
fascinated by the passing of time
For him, painting is a form of both archaeology and remembrance
Dorothea Rockburne, "D" Study for Scalar, (chipboard, crude oil, paper and nails), 1970 [Craig Starr Gallery, New York, NY. © Dorothea Rockburne / ARS, New York]
Exhibition: Dorothea Rockburne: Works 1967-1972, September 7 – October 20, 2012
Process Art
"The term process art refers to where the process of its making art is not hidden but remains a prominent aspect of the completed work, so that a part or even the whole of its subject is the making of the work"
Process became a widespread preoccupation of artists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, but like so much else can be tracked back to the abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock. In these the successive layers of dripped and poured paint can be identified and the actions of the artist in making the work can be to some extent reconstructed. The later colour field paintings of Morris Louis clearly reveal his process of pouring the paint onto the canvas.
In process art too there is an emphasis on the results on particular materials of carrying out the process determined by the artist. In Louis again, the forms are the result of the interaction of artist’s action, the type and viscosity of the paint, and the type and absorbency of the canvas. Richard Serra made work by throwing molten lead into the corners of a room. Robert Morrismade long cuts into lengths of felt and then hung them on a nail or placed them on the floor, allowing them to take on whatever configurations were dictated by the interaction of the innate properties of the felt, the artist’s action and gravity.
The British painter Bernard Cohen made paintings by establishing a set process for the work and then carrying it through until the canvas was full. John Hilliard’s photographic work Camera Recording its Own Condition of 1971 is a particularly pure example of process art, as is Michael Craig-Martin’s 4 Complete Clipboard Sets.
he later colour field paintings of Morris Louis clearly reveal his process of pouring the paint onto the canvas.
Louis again, the forms are the result of the interaction of artist’s action, the type and viscosity of the paint, and the type and absorbency of the canvas.
Alice Baber - Ladder Sun Dance
Experiment Excerpts series
Black, 2012. C-print, 60 x 50"
This series results from Nelson’s experiments with historical mordançage techniques. The patterns resembling organic matter are the outcomes ofstrong chemical reactions orchestrated in the laboratory. When combined, the molecular structures of these varying substances are dismantled and rearranged to form patterns of undulating wave-like swirls. In digitally blowing up the traces of these analog procedures, Nelson directs our attention towards the life-like features of chemicals pointing to what the writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov refers to as possibility of other worldly “life-not-as-we-know-it.” As such, Experiment Excerpts bring to mind what the feminist philosopher Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter,” the forces and flows of materialities that can become lively, signaling, and affective; a liveliness that is swerving, buzzing, and turbulent
Brittany Nelson (b. 1984, Great Falls, MT) explores 19th-century photographic chemistry techniques and science fiction to address themes of loneliness, isolation, and distance within the queer community and its parallels with space exploration.
Mordançage Series
Distorting processes from photographic history, the vibrant patterns in these reliefs are caused by violent chemical reactions. In applying mordançage solutions to silver gelatin prints, Nelson bleaches selected areas and simultaneously lifts specific dark hues of the emulsion. This late 19th century technique is commonly appreciated for its stark contrasts, precise contours, and depths of light applied to create life-like portraits. In appropriating the historical process, Nelson suspends virtuosity and representation as photographic ideals. The works gouge a different potential application of the chemical bonds and—in continuation of feminist and queer abstraction—unfetter the constraints of resemblance to real-world referents. They call to mind Luciana Parisi’s cyberfeminist theory of microfeminine particle-forces emerging from non-linear reactions between potential and actual desires, resulting in intensifications of mutant desires.
Color field Painting
The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour.
From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gesturalapplication associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors.
Sam Gillan
Watercolour, 4 1969
Watercolor, and aluminum powder on fiberglass paper 23 3/4 x 18 1/8" (60.3 x 45.9 cm)
Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation, Sam Gilliam wrestles with the physicality of the art object and its relationship to the viewer.
he moved to Washington, DC, during the formation of Color Field painting, which emphasized the use of flat planes of color and novel paint application techniques.
Gilliam soon experimented with color, form, and technique, pouring pigments and folding canvases while still wet.
remove his canvases from their stretchers entirely, and, inspired by laundry on clotheslines, hang them from the ceiling or walls.
Gilliam transformed painting into something sculptural and three-dimensional, disrupting traditional modes of presentation and viewing.
He also incorporated metal forms, alternative materials like yarn and glitter, varied applications of paint, and quilt-inspired patterning into his practice.
“the expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political. My work is as political as it is formal.”
Sam Gilliam, Green April, 1969,
acrylic on canvas, 98 x 271 x 3 7/8 inches (248.9 x 688.3 x 9.8 cm), Collection of Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photography by Lee Thompson.
his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.
YOURS, JUST THE WORD AND I WILL BE THERE.
1. letters to felice, frank kafka | 2. strangers, ethel cain | 3. overture (1992), helen frankenthaler | 4. desperation sits heavy on my tongue, a.m | 5. against the loveless world: a novel, susan abulhawa | 6. a green thought in a green scale (1981), helen frankenthaler | 7. wife, mitski | 8. ruth 1:16 | 9. lush spring (1975), helen frankenthaler | 10. no exit, jean-paul sartre
