The work of a Formal Expansionist

I have been indoors for days.  It is very beautiful outside............snow galore..........but setting foot outside on icy ground means risking a broken leg, neck or worse, so I am stuck indoors.  With my cat.  Tho she goes out occasionally as you can see. In the meantime,  I am a bit stir crazy.

As a result, I make no apologies for sharing with you, the work of a fellow artist called MISTY.   Misty, who hails from Canada, is well known not only as a painter, but also for her performance art - the last photo on the blog.

Her work is on record in a book called "Why Cats Paint".  If you have anything resembling a sense of humour.....and perhaps a slightly eyebrows-raised view of some of the more pretentious aspects of the art world...you might enjoy these pictures, and the text which goes with them, taken directly from the book.

Finished work preserved in situ, North York, Toronto.

"Misty's elegant, bi-colored forms that sometimes extend up to ten metres in length, are immediately evocative and invite a wide range of projective interpretations.  In a recent work -A Little Lavish Leaping - the surface is heavily built up with short black verticals to produce an elongated curvilinear mass that is at once dense yet strongly nuanced with movement.  Tensions gathers at the base and builds upwards, flowing to a release (or is it curtailment) in the upper ovoidal form.
Misty's paintings are greatly valued for their strong yet ambiguous imagery which, combined with contextual uncertainty, allow for a great richness of interpretation.  The power of this sort of cat art lies in its very incomprehensibility which enables it to provoke and intrigue".

Work in progress:

Working with very quick strokes, Misty lays down the pink "tension" areas first.

The "action structure" is composed of dense black verticals overlayed to suggest a series of interconnected curvilinear forms

Here, Misty "insisted" that the stool be placed in position
 so that she could complete the upper curved form to her satisfaction

Finally, here we see Misty displaying her "Performance Art".

Misty uses her own body to make a living sculpture of a mouse, thereby creating an empathetic, one-to-one communication between artist and viewer, cat and mouse.






The book is still available on Amazon.  I highly recommend it.