Home
Happiest With Blossoms Above My Head and Flowers Around My Feet
Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT. A two-person show with Margot Glass. Through June 30th
Review by Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, September 29, 2023
“Battenfield focuses tightly on branches of flowering and leafing trees, which she renders in just two colors of ink-like acrylic pigment. Vivid but spare, the pictures at Addison/Ripley Fine Art all have white backgrounds, so they resemble traditional East Asian paintings on paper. Actually, the artist daubs on clear Mylar, which is not absorbent. So the paint pools and glows, giving the illusion that it’s still wet.
Battenfield begins with her own photographs, whose forms she reproduces accurately. Yet there’s an intriguing element of chance to her process: She paints with the two colors mixed, then watches them separate as they dry. That explains the fluid transitions of the shifting hues, which may disengage altogether or remain partly melded. The technique is a ready-made metaphor for the workings of nature, which produces individual organisms that are nonetheless essentially connected.”
INTIMATE MEDITATIONS ON LANDSCAPE WHILE LOOKING UP
My fascination with branches and leaves originated from a week I spent at a rural meditation retreat in the 90’s. Spring was slowly awakening the landscape from its winter bareness. For hours each day I sat next to a window, in silence. As my city mindset quieted, I was transfixed as tender buds and leaves daily transformed a gnarly elm tree outside. My paintings evoke the immediacy of that experience. My hand slowly reanimates the twisting and branching line of a tree limb, the subtle curve of a bamboo stalk, or the concentric marks radiating out from a single stone dropped into still water.
Check out my book:
The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love
“345 pages of pure career coaching gold”
