Stacey Warnix is an American lyrical abstraction painter who uses gestural methods to create large-scale paintings, layering mixed media pigments and collage over raw textiles. Her paintings explore the experiential affect of nuanced color and scale, using disparate materials and layered textures to subtly shift the perception, light reflectivity, and luminosity of her landscape-inspired color fields.
Introduced to representational oil painting by an artist grandmother, Stacey created paintings and collages throughout her school years, winning frequent awards, but ultimately pursued a professional career in law and finance. She lived and worked professionally 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. Today, she paints to escape a world of precision, finding respite in abstract forms, textures, and tones. Stacey’s paintings feature nuanced layers of mixed media pigments interspersed with collage. Her extensive years in residence along the California coastline made an indelible impression and that influence shows throughout her body of work, with marked visual references to time-worn, hazy memories of light-filled coastal vistas.
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.”