This quarter, I visited the Lewis Focus Gallery at the VMFA which had an exhibit of female abstract expressionists. Since I generally work in the abstract, I felt that look at work by professionals would help me improve my mark and message. This exhibit was put together in response to the idea that "'action painting' was the domain of men" such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Although these men's work is notable, this exhibition focuses on the work of women.
If there is one thing that I have learned from these paintings, it's that less can be more. I've been focusing and spending too much time on getting the background just right rather than diving into the foreground of my work. And when I do, I make try to make things more complicated than they need to be. I need to focus more on color, mark, and composition. These artists have created beautiful works of art with a lot of depth but also with simplicity. I would really like to know if they named their paintings before or after they began working because some of the titles just click while others, I could never relate to.