ChloeNewton: FMP artists

Artists

Margie Livingston

Most painters are, abstractly speaking, sculptors of paint, building images through the careful application of layered pigments. But Livingston pushes this idea to an extreme in her construction of three-dimensional forms.

Margie Livingston has long been admired for her abstract paintings that articulate the interaction between the architectural grid and the natural, organic world. Based on three-dimensional models that she builds in the studio, her paintings directly translate the phenomena of space, light, color and gravity upon these hybrid structures into lines and bands of color that hang seemingly suspended in space. Now, letting accident and discovery meet invention and experimentation, Livingston reverses her usual process, using paint to construct objects. Her new paint objects—built entirely from dots, strips, and skins of dried acrylic pigment—investigate the properties of paint pushed into three dimensions and offer a compelling view into how the medium of paint can be used sculpturally. With this major transformation of her practice Livingston has moved away from working with the illusion of space and toward working with literal space, constructing objects that straddle two media—painting and sculpture.

Leah Rosenburg

Stacks of paint: turning paint into a sculpture.
Using layer upon layer of dried acrylic paint she creates colorful monuments that blur the line between painting and sculpture. These luscious slabs appear to be wet, ready to curl and swirl at any moment. In her own words these “…bodies of work combine systems of accumulation and elements of layering to explore how our experiences, emotions, and memories build up over time.”