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 a lyrical abstraction painter, Stacey’s paintings emphasize experiential, nuanced color over composition. Contrasting moments of positive versus negative space, layered translucence, light reflectivity, and luminosity are recurring elements in her organic color forward displays.
Finding respite in abstracted forms, textures, and tones, Stacey pulls from a distorted memory bank of places observed during extensive travels. She allows happenstance and intuitive gestural marks to shape compositions that evoke impressions of deconstructed landscapes or loosely splayed flowers: “Visually, I tend to notice floral patterns in distant horizons, and I have allowed this phenomenon to find its way into my imagery.”