Kaylie Abela
143 Park Drive · Boston
Kaylie.Abela@gmail.com · 860.967.6396
As a young child, my mother would occupy me by sitting me at the kitchen counter with a coloring book and crayons. At the time, I was an expert at staying in the lines. Almost two decades later, having turned in my crayons for acrylic paint, I now evade the boundaries of narrative imagery.
The flaws in a work of art bring it to life and give it an identity. Artists have relationships with their artwork. They nurture it, but also allow it to run its course when necessary. My most recent body of paintings employs this kind of love.
In the series Ice and its subsequent work (including First Born and Eglowsystems), ice is left to melt over beads of paint. I nurture the work by carefully preparing the surface of the canvas to both absorb the media enough to stain, and also to repel the water just enough for it to pool and evaporate. The results are mysterious marks of color that interact with one another spontaneously. Preliminary areas of raw paint are intuitively placed on the primed canvas, many times following my inclination towards a vertical, linear format. Since the ice is a main contributor to the imagery that evolves, resulting shapes are likely to stray from the initial laying of the paint.
The unpredictable nature of the ice denotes unforeseen, inevitable change. I do not manipulate the melting ice, just as I cannot control inevitability in life. Rather, I highlight the value of possibility.
Driven by intuition, most of my portfolio has a central theme of chance. Paint is beautiful as a substance alone. My work strives to just let paint be paint.
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