LINDSAY WALT received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. Her paintings have been extensively exhibited in the United States and, most recently, in Ireland. Among the many prominent private and public collections in which her work is included is the U.S. Embassy in Djibouti, (ART in Embassies), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, New York Public Library, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Yale University of Art. Walt’s studio is located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Question:

In many of your paintings the foreground and background together create an all-over atmospheric field, while in your recent paintings, large star shapes become significant points of focus constructing much more of a figure/ground relationship. Will you talk about this shift and the use of the star-like form?

Answer:

After seeing Miro’s “Constellation” series at MOMA a few years ago, I was struck by his use of line and archetype symbols, particularly stars, to suggest a cosmos. His process of working ideas out first on paper parallels my practice of using watercolor studies as a springboard into painting.

STARFISH(e), watercolor on paper, 9″ x 12″, 2015

The ethereal space of my earlier work depicts a floating world of improvised webbed patterns loosely based on natural phenomena like ice crystals, webs, and stars. My intent was to paint the intangible by touching down as lightly as possible.

Northstar and the Grassman, 2015 oil on canvas, 40 x 48”

In my more recent paintings, by increasing the scale and gesture of the stars, the figure/ground relationship shifts from delicate to muscular.  The stars have morphed into insistent drippy blue entities, which jostle for place against the precise red webbing.  I paint back and forth between ground and background so spatially it’s hard to distinguish the two.

On a practical level, I was hoping by painting large forms I could shorten some of the laborious obsessive painting process.  Ironically, just the opposite proved true!

Three Chords and the Truth, 2015, oil on canvas, 40 x 40”