Biography 

Stacey Warnix is an American lyrical abstractionist painter who uses gestural methods to create color-forward, large scale abstract paintings. Her practice explores the experiential affect of atmospheric color and scale, employing disparate materials and dimensional layering to subtly shift the perception, light reflectivity, and luminosity of gestural fields of color.  

Introduced young to representational oil painting by an artist grandmother, Stacey was an active creator through her formative years, but ultimately pursued a career in law and finance, working in California and London before moving to Texas, where she started painting again. Struggling with autoimmune disease, infertility, and miscarriages, Stacey experimented with gestural abstraction and became enamored with the process as a meditative escape, finding respite in the abstract forms, textures, and tones – and a means to quietly process the isolation and sorrow. 

Stacey builds color with extensive layering of transparent washes and inks, yielding nuanced color and nonfigurative form.  Palette selections reference time-worn, hazy memories of light-filled vistas along the California coastline, Europe, and the Texas Hill Country – the places that shaped her. Over nearly 10 years of painting with renewed purpose and appreciation, Stacey’s paintings evoke the emotional, hazy residue of remembered spaces, offering sentimental moments for pause, reflection, and quiet emotional connection.

Artist Statement

My large-scale paintings evoke the emotional residue of remembered places while resisting literal representation. Working intuitively using a deliberately-restrained range of pigments, poured gravitational flows, and gestural mark making, I paint immersive fields of color where places and moments are memorialized in atmosphere, light, temperature, and tone.

I start each painting with a singular chromatic intention, rather than a predetermined composition. My goal: a color to be felt,  not an image to be remembered. Believing that color can carry us somewhere representation cannot, I prioritize the color experience over imagery. By removing form, I quiet the visual noise.

Working in both gestural abstraction and color field, I allow each composition to unfold through a balance of intuition and surrender. I manifest a nuanced color experience by embracing a wide range of media and dimensional layering, building thin veils of translucent, hand-mixed pigments, layer by layer, through successive pours and interventions to create a surface with subtle depth, luminosity, and light reflectivity.

Rather than documenting specific locations, I explore the distant, time-worn impression of having occupied them. Vague landscape references dissolve into what I hope is an openly contemplative experience. Scale plays an essential role in this encounter, drawing each viewer beyond observation into immersion, where color can be felt as much as it is seen. Here, color becomes not merely an element of painting but its central experience, where viewers can linger in quiet moments of presence, reflection, and emotional resonance.