Stacey Warnix
is an American lyrical abstraction painter who uses gestural methods to create large-scale, color-forward paintings. Her practice explores the experiential affect of nuanced 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.
Stacey experimented with gestural abstraction and became enamored with the process as a meditative escape, finding respite in abstract forms, textures, and tones. She builds color with extensive layering of transparent washes which intersect to yield nuanced color and nonfigurative form. Her 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.
PROCESS
As an established lyrical abstraction painter, Stacey Warnix works in a style that surrenders control to gravitational applications and imprecise, intuitive mark making – prioritizing a nuanced color experience over composition. Her use of disparate materials to highlight juxtapositions in light reflectivity, luminosity, positive versus negative space, translucence versus opacity are recurring elements deployed thoughout her organic color-forward displays. The following commentary reflects remarks about her creative process and inspirations, offered in her own words:
Although I work across several different styles – mainly gestural abstraction, but also including color field and assemblage – there are themes and elements that repeat throughout my practice: raw materials, negative space, monotonal tendencies, juxtapositions and duality, paired elements, complex (often transparent) layering, and organic, unrefined edges. The unifying character of my artworks across all collections is an experiential exploration of color, light/luminosity, and juxtapositions of disparate materials. My paintings always begin with a singular “color experience” intention.
I ground my works on raw, unprimed textiles. With a nubby, imperfect, and unpredictable surface texture, I immediately am forced to surrender control as the initial marks immediately and permanently stain the surface. I have learned to embrace and celebrate the happenstance, employing intuitive, gestural marks that connect elements as I work.
I appreciate the respite one finds in abstracted forms, textures, and tones, but I would not describe myself as working in pure, strict abstraction. A viewer might discern compositions that evoke impressions of deconstructed landscapes or loosely splayed flowers or shapes and patterns that slightly resemble organic elements, like flower petals or insect wings. This is because I typically perceive floral arrays when I look at a distant or aerial horizon, and over time, built upon a distorted memory bank of places observed during extensive travels, I have allowed this phenomenon to influence a lot of my imagery.
My creative methods belie the soft-handed, often suede-like, appearance of my finished paintings that one might see in photographs or from a distance. Rather, my methods can be frenetic and rough and include intentional distressing to reveal contrasting underlayers. In person, one may notice grittier details, like traces of underlying intuitive marks, splatters, and even brush hairs left behind in evidence of the brisk application. I hope there is a relatability in this juxtaposition: the notion that gentleness has endured a foundation of grit and struggle. I think it is a beautiful metaphor for the way many of us try to live.
Above all, I hope for an experience that captivates and uplifts viewers in a private moment of silence. To this end, I employ a wide range of layered pigments and media that jointly contribute a sense of luminosity. I sometimes incorporate layers of thin paper in still-wet puddles of paint so that, once cured, the slightly altered surface will distort the refraction of light and the perception of color, lending an enhanced ethereal effect. I think it is these nuanced, filtered color deviations that transfix a viewer and elicit a uniquely immersive, emotive association for each viewer.