Notes on Painting ~ Space

Out of the Blue, acrylic on cradled wood panel, 12 x 12 inches

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. 
~ John Updike ~

​Creating a feeling of spaciousness is something that I struggle with in my abstract landscape works. The spaces I strive to create in my paintings are a direct response to the landscape here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There is distance but also a closeness of rising mountainsides, tree lines and forests.

​When I painted more representationally it was a fairly easy task for me to create a sense of atmospheric perspective and allude to what is in the foreground vs background, or off in the distance. However, now as I paint more intuitively rather than representationally, my natural tendency is to flatten the space and create more of a patterned surface rather than a sense of space. 

Sweet Dreams, acrylic on paper, 12 x 18 inches

​So why not go with what is easy for me? I can easily manipulate color and shape until I have a shallow or flattened feeling of space. However, I like the challenge of creating space with abstracted shapes. My desire is to allude to a place that the viewer can visually enter into and wonder around in, even if it doesn’t make sense in terms of the actual world. All the better that it doesn’t!

Far and Away, acrylic on paper, 11 x 15 inches, sold

​So I press on, setting up these imaginary worlds of shapes and colors, with the intent of creating the suggestion, or feeling of a place, without articulating an actual place. Perhaps they are inspired by familiar places, or a distant memory, or a result of our collective unconscious.  I enjoy making puzzles out of positive and negative space, and leaving the viewer to ask questions rather than providing all the answers about a place.  

Blue Moon, acrylic on cradled wood panel, 12 x 12 inches

All artists live in the gap between what they imagine and produce,
no finished painting ever looks as good as the one I see in my mind,
​but the next one might. 
~ Brian Rutenberg ~

As always, the paintings shown here are available in my Etsy shop. September 20% off sale going on now! Clicking on the photos should take you right there. 

*All images and content in this article is ©Ann Thompson Nemcosky.
Please do not reproduce in any way. Thank you.*