This ambiguity of form, rendered through a deep understanding of the narrative and haptic power of translucently rendered color, suspends the image somewhere between abstract composition and storytelling, creating interior, psychological spaces evoking memory and place.”Įkasala says she “is always learning,” and you can see it while tracing her career. “In Terry Ekasala's abstract paintings, perceivable subjects - figures, landscapes, interiors, objects - are evoked, yet never fully revealed. When Ekasala won the Vermont Prize this summer, Chrissie Isles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, offered this assessment of her work: There’s something like movement contained in the canvasses. In works such as “Air I Breathe,” an oil piece full of blues and greens that evokes hills and hot-air balloons, or “I See You Everywhere,” an acrylic one depicting a ghastly white figure, layered brushstrokes add physical and conceptual depth to the final image. And each time brush meets canvas a piece evolves bit by bit. She often turns a painting upside down or on its side, looking for a new perspective on the ideas still forming across the linen seams. Sometimes Ekasala can take months to finish. “If I come up with an image really quick, and there’s not enough paint on the canvas, I can’t leave it like that,” she said. So she daubs and swirls and slashes until, eventually, images start to evolve from the mass of colors and textures, and it all comes together to form the final work. “The only thing I am really sure of when I start is mixing the paint,” she said. But for a few years now, she has stuck strictly to oil paints on linen canvases and acrylic on paper.Ĭourtesy Terry Ekasala's Statues and Shadows in the Garden, made with oil paints on a linen canvas in 2022.Įkasala tends to work on multiple pieces at once, something dictated by her style and mediums: Oil paints have a slow-drying nature, and she likes to play with layers and transparency. For a while, she used acrylic paint and mixed media, incorporating plaster or sand into the image-making. “Every single solitary time I’m scared to death - I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, half-tongue-in-cheek.Įach painting starts differently, Ekasala said, from the materials used to the image on the canvas. What comes next is a process based on not having any process at all. Then she stretches sheets of linen over the frame, fastening them with rabbit skin glue and tightening up the fabric, before priming the canvas with several coats of gesso. She builds the frame of the canvas, sometimes up to 72 by 84 inches, from wood. Some 30 years into her career, she’s refined her style in the Kingdom quiet.Įach canvas she uses, Ekasala constructs by hand. There she spends hours in a solitary retrofitted barn overlooking the mountain, a place that cultivates creation and expression, she said, “an anchor in my art.” One day she felt an itch to head stateside and later on a whim moved in 2001 to the Northeast Kingdom, where she’s lived and worked ever since. ![]() She started in earnest in the ’80s, living and painting in a Miami studio before moving to Belleville, a neighborhood in Paris, and spending several years as an artist in the French capital. ![]() ![]() “It’s all paying off now,” she added soon after. “I’m proud of myself,” Ekasala said, in her sticking with painting all these years and dedicating as much time as she can to being in the studio. ![]() Courtesy Terry Ekasaka in the studio in June.
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