Spoken Yeahs From A Distance, 2016, Oil on canvas, 98 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ
There is something about the tactile surface of a painting that I love. Something so tangible and sexy in the way paint is built up, layered, made to stand out from its surface, as if it cannot be contained within the boundaries of two dimensional space. It feels almost like watching the artist work in front of you, watching them make decisions and marks and erasures, watching their arm arc to create a shape, it is positively intimate. Impasto. Im-PAS-to. Im-pas-TO. IM-pas-to. Even the word feels bouncy, like bubblegum in my mouth, like taffy-pulling, like peaks of whipped cream. That’s what that is called, the paint that has physical shape in which brushstrokes and palette knife scratches are visible. The word “impasto” is derived from the Italian word for “paste”, you get the idea. The Italians got it right. The Italians always get it right.
I think this appreciation has a great deal to do with the fact that I am utterly incapable of putting brush to canvas and creating anything I like more than the blank, unmarked canvas itself. It’s true. I agonize over every brushstroke, dislike every gesture, am intrinsically unsuited to painting a picture. My inability to experiment, to get out of my own way and out of my head has engendered within me an awe of those who are able.
I stumbled–I like the idea of stumbling, I feel like that’s how I learn about a number of artists these days, by forming no set itinerary or intention and just wandering until I literally trip on something that makes me pause–on Victoria Morton’s work at an art fair last year and immediately fell for her brushwork and for the large swaths and washes of rich color laid to suggest volume and shape. Some pictures are geometric, unstudied and unpracticed, others bear faint hints of figures and pointillist dots. I simultaneously admire and envy her ease with a brush.
Check out some of my favorites below, and be sure to visit her Insta for the latest. Victoria Morton is currently represented by Sadie Coles HQ in London.
Memory Boy, 2015, Oil on canvas, 95 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ
Back Stroke, 2017, Oil on linen, 6 x 8 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ