American artist Antoinette Wysocki is an expressionistic painter who employs mixed media on organic materials, removing herself from the confines of stretched canvas. Paper allows the artist to play with absorption rates and its characteristic malleable quality retains the immediacy of drawing - which has always been the touchstone for Wysocki’s painting.
The artist has developed a process of combining various materials, chance, control and analysis in her pieces. In each of her works, Wysocki creates a balance between the media and absorption rate of the surface, so that the various materials interact, binding or refracting from each other and the paper itself. Each work starts with gestures and washes, then moves into controlled brush strokes with detail. When the painting reaches a comfortable finished point, it is then time to indulge in the materials. The goal is to balance raw, untouched paper in some areas with highly saturated color in others, sometimes consciously, others by chance. One misused layer of material can alter the piece beyond repair, inspire to the next step or become the focus of the piece itself.
As such, the works teeter between governance and circumstance: the artist organically alters, enhances and even erases shapes. The works are introspective and deeply expressive, close inspection across a body of her work reveals a diary of inscribed messages and ghost-like imagery, recording the artist’s process of reconciling the imagery with her psyche.
Antoinette Wysocki received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and has shown widely in galleries such in New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle, New Mexico and Washington D.C. In 2007 she was nominated for next emerging artist by GLAAD in New York City and was awarded an artist’s grant for a artist program through the Santa Fe Art Institute.
