Jackie Saccoccio

 

Jackie Saccoccio (1963 –2020) was an American abstract painter. Her works, considered examples of gestural abstraction, featured bright color, large canvases, and deliberately introduced randomness.Saccoccio's works have been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. She received the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Artadia award in 2015 and was also awarded grants from the Fulbright–Hays Program (1990), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000), and the American Academy in Rome.Starting in the 1990s, Saccoccio was known for her vivid and evocative works of gestural abstraction, building on the work of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Her works, inspired by abstract expressionism and Italian Baroque art, were part of a movement which emphasized adding vitality to abstract painting through experimentation with randomness and paint handling. Jerry Saltz, reviewing a 2007 show in The Village Voice, noted Saccoccio's influences: "Saccoccio's paintings come dangerously close to looking like mid-century abstraction, particularly the work of artists like Joan Mitchell and de Kooning. Yet if you spend time in this show, the old-school quotient subsides and sparks begin to fly."Saccoccio worked with large canvases on which she outlaid "expansive waves and splashes of bright, luminous color", creating fragmented visual spaces.She introduced randomness in her works by pouring and splattering paint while tilting the canvas in different directions.She also transferred paint between canvases, pulled them across, and scraped through dry paint pigments to add onto the randomness.In what has been described as an intensely physical process, she would sometimes press together two large and wet canvases, apply mica for an additional layer of sheen, and at times have as many as 50 layers of paint on her canvas.These actions, and the added bright colors, introduced an additional element of spontaneity to her works.The outcome was highly layered, vibrantly colored, drip-networked, and had large shifting fields of color. Wikipedia 

Jackie Saccoccio - Action Painting

 

  Jackie Saccoccio (1963 – 2020) was an American abstract painter. Her works, considered examples of gestural abstraction, featured bright color, large canvases, and deliberately introduced randomness.
Saccoccio's works have been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. She received the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Artadia award in 2015 and was also awarded grants from the Fulbright–Hays Program (1990), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000), and the American Academy in Rome.
Starting in the 1990s, Saccoccio was known for her vivid and evocative works of gestural abstraction, building on the work of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell.Her works, inspired by abstract expressionism and Italian Baroque art, were part of a movement which emphasized adding vitality to abstract painting through experimentation with randomness and paint handling. Jerry Saltz, reviewing a 2007 show in The Village Voice, noted Saccoccio's influences: "Saccoccio's paintings come dangerously close to looking like mid-century abstraction, particularly the work of artists like Joan Mitchell and de Kooning. Yet if you spend time in this show, the old-school quotient subsides and sparks begin to fly."
Saccoccio worked with large canvases on which she outlaid "expansive waves and splashes of bright, luminous color", creating fragmented visual spaces.She introduced randomness in her works by pouring and splattering paint while tilting the canvas in different directions. She also transferred paint between canvases, pulled them across, and scraped through dry paint pigments to add onto the randomness.In what has been described as an intensely physical process, she would sometimes press together two large and wet canvases, apply mica for an additional layer of sheen, and at times have as many as 50 layers of paint on her canvas.These actions, and the added bright colors, introduced an additional element of spontaneity to her works.The outcome was highly layered,vibrantly colored, drip-networked,and had large shifting fields of color.Wikipedia

 

Frank Avray Wilson - Action Painting

"Frank Avray Wilson born on the multi-cultural island of Mauritius in 1914, Avray Wilson came to Abstraction following years of scientific research into the source of human aesthetics. Having graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in biology in 1938, Avray Wilson used his scientific knowledge to further his painting. Once he discovered that colour is not matter but energy, that an image could be alive as a living cell under a microscope, and that human art-making is a reflection of Nature’s Art Making, Avray Wilson arrived at full abstract gestural painting during the early 1950's. His explosions of colour and shapes burst in strength and liveliness, and are in their dignity and abstract grandeur challenging our predisposed understanding of what art should be.Avray Wilson himself commented on his scientific background:'I studied biology hoping that it would provide me with an explanation of the wonder of life. But the claim that life was no more than a molecular mechanism, led me to join the ranks of 'vitalist' biologists, who recognised that life, like beauty, was a quality, not a thing. Artists do not usually need a justification for art. The power of art is convincing enough. But my scientific background obliged me to find an explanation of nature's art, which I felt sure would provide me with the firmest justification for human art.'Vitalism in biology implies a natural transcendental level, which is not material or spatial, the source of vitality. Here was also an explanation of nature's art, as the revelation of transcendental qualities in life and Nature. The artist's mind could be guided from the same source to create 'vitalistic' imageries. 'In aspiring to a vitalistic painting, biology had taught me the key importance of form in the expression of vitality. At profound molecular levels, vitally involved forms could be expressed in complex geometries, indicating that the visible 'organic' forms of life had a profound geometric basis."(whitfordfineart.com)