SHAPE SHIFT 2026

ARTIST STATEMENT 

When I was twenty-one I had a moment of realization thinking to myself:  I could do this forever (painting)and never get bored.  And that has held true.  For each body of work, I follow my energy driven by curiosity in response to a question or challenge that the previous work has presented.

The last body of work involved primarily straight lines and angles, and so I thought it would be fun to mix things up a bit by involving the circle, more loose brushwork and collage, less taped lines.  I like to begin with the idea of no idea and work in a stream of consciousness manner so that the idea is discovered rather than imposed. Quickly laying out a loose iPad sketch on to the canvas, things immediately change from small to large, virtual to real, and suddenly the unexpected arrives.  From there a call and response process emerges where everything becomes fodder for the painting—something as simple as a scrap of paper on the floor or otherworldly as a sci-fi news story. Serendipity and synchronicity become important in the process of transforming materials into that with resonance.

The title for the show, Shape Shift, was a contender among many, but I thought it best reflected the idea of the shaped canvas as the thread that held my work together from the beginning.  The works hover between painting and sculpture, image and object, the illusion and real, so with a slight shift in shape/perspective seemingly endless possibilities arise.  The paintings become very dense as they emerge not from one thing but from many things over a period of time.  So, throughout the process I am looking to see more clearly, to simplify that density into a single gestalt, which unravels in ripples like a pebble hitting the surface of water, as one studies the painting.  In the end the work reflects a kind of balancing act of opposites held in equipment:  a transformation of the familiar to the eccentric, and the use of the universal language of geometric shapes to arrive at the personal.

Exhibit 208

Shape Shift Musings

4/4/26

The visual thread that ties all the works together is a shape shift and is what one experiences as one walks around the room from painting to painting. In this show, the language of geometric abstraction is approached from an intuitive sensation/feeling mindset rather than a logical/thinking mindset. This means geometry arises from a felt sense of space. One works off a template of not-knowing rather than a preconceived plan, such as using the golden rectangle or some kind of mathematical system, which means the correlation between intention and outcome is far from certain, is unexpected, and may be surprising. “Shape Shift” also implies transformation, as from one state of being to another. I look at each of the paintings as a presence, each with a unique personality.

What interests me most is how to come up with something totally singular, but still looks like a painting that came from the same source as the others, and was done by the same hand. Over the years, a certain vocabulary of form has been built that one finds repeated throughout the works. Even though the works are geometric and abstract, each piece has what one might call a different story, an abstract narrative. Some are very straightforward, others more complex. 

The shaped canvas sets the stage for what I think of as a painting event. The starting shape is grounded in reality and grows out of the original rectangular structure of the painting. It may be influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by architectural relationships, or any form of structure seen in the real world. After the shape is built, the stage is set. The painting event occurs when paint goes to canvas. This step is non-objective in its nature, such as, a fascination with circles, grids, pours, angles, patterns, color. In fact, there’s a great title, William Lumpkins, one of the NM Transcendental Group members, gave to one of his works from 1947 called: “A Painting is Conceived as the Color Flows From Brush to Paper.” It is from this flow of paint to canvas that titles and stories eventually emerge.

So for a change of pace, I would like to focus on the titles and stories behind the process present in some of the paintings. The titles give a clue into the story and can sometimes be important in getting meaning from the painting. The painting titled “Cat’s Cradle” is a painting that was originally inspired by the structural curves and abstract dot pattern defining the segmented tube form of a caterpillar. Unfortunately, I had the idea of the caterpillar pattern in my mind for quite awhile, until I finally realized it wasn’t ever going to work. This happens frequently, where I’ll have to completely throw out the original motivation. At a loss, I just began connecting the dots, which had at some point earlier turned into circles because I was attempting to literally see more clearly. 

Out of the blue, the string game cat’s cradle, suddenly presented. “Cat’s Cradle”: Kurt Vonnegut. I have always loved the Vonnegut quote: “No wonder kids grow up crazy, a cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of x’s between somebody’s hands and little kids look and look and look at all those x’s”…that’s exactly how I felt looking at my painting. Like, what is this? What am I doing with a string game? After recalling Vonnegut, the artist Magritte came to mind with his painting “This is not a Pipe.” 

So on the back of the painting, I decided it would be fun to put Felix the cat combined with a bunch of the physicist Neil Bohr’s atom diagrams, as I needed to hide all the wires that attached the elements on the front, and besides, atoms are how we understand objects nowadays. So I glued all that on the back along with the Vonnegut quote “No damn cat and no damn cradle”. I added Felix the cat just to make the whole thing feel double crazy as there was already a cradle on the back, which was part of the original platform of the construction. So it had to have a cat as well. The irony of the whole thing is that the word cat is in caterpillar. The seed was all there from the beginning.

I like to play with a certain amount of absurdity. Another painting along this line is “Groove Yard.” The black skeletal structure originally laid out against the white ground became very reminiscent of paintings by Mondrian. I didn’t want to do another Mondrian painting, so I thought let’s be anti-Mondrian. I put in a decorative Terrazzo-like ground, a circle pattern with one of the circles projecting out like a ball, all done in beautiful offbeat colors and completed the painting by throwing in some elusive shadows to totally disrupt the flatness of the picture plane. 

Later, when I was looking at the painting and wondering what to call it, I was listening to the jazz instrumental “Groove Yard” by the Montgomery Brothers from 1959. It really seemed to fit the painting. I could even see the white area as a yard. I felt so happy—in my mind, “Groove Yard” became the soundtrack for the painting and being a jazz tune, it connected back to Mondrian and his painting “Boogie-woogie” from 1943. So I titled the painting “Groove Yard” and Mondrian ended up having the first and last word regarding this painting. 

These conversations I have in my head about a painting and how to title it often include how I consider others might view the painting if they were to stumble upon it. “Facture” is one such example. I’d never heard the word facture until it suddenly popped into my head, while once again, wondering what to call the painting. “Fracture” seemed the obvious choice, but ”Facture” kept insisting. I looked it up: the original meaning of facture was to do, make, and was specifically used in reference to Monet’s facture, that is, his paint handling and brushwork. I thought that fits close enough. My paint handling doesn’t have to be brushwork like Monet’s. It has elements I use in making a painting and there even is some thick paint. 

But then I thought, someone might look at the title “Facture” and just think it was a typo and the letter “R” was left out. The painting so readily reads as fracture and appears to be a marker of the times we are in so that should really be the title. Then I thought I’ll put the “R” on the side. If one looks around the painting, they’ll see it, and it will make perfect sense, and it will be the viewer who completes the painting, which a good painting allows after all—never spell it all out, always suggest. But on the other hand, one might just think, what’s the letter “R” doing on the side of this painting? This made me laugh, plus I like how that “R” looks—a nice font, so in it went.

 Although I really enjoy putting something unexpected or goofy in a painting, as it brings that child-like element of play and fun into the picture. I also enjoy exploring a range of emotion where some paintings feel grounded just in what you see and are self evident, being basically focused on aspects of perception. “Similar Differences,” “Color Theory,” “Duo,” and even “Plot Twist,” with it’s use of chirascuro putting the large brushstrokes into a portrait like space, are all paintings where there is purely satisfaction in looking. Of course, I would say “purely satisfaction in looking” is true for all the works in the show as well.

Then there are those with titles and stories that are more lyrical in nature which I associate with being more musical or poetic in feeling. These include: “Verdant Harmonics,” “Moonlight Shadows,” “Moving Through Time,” and the circle within a square small constructions. “Fragment of an Elegy” is one that has actual text from a poem by Rilke by the same name. 

Again, the initial impulse was purely non-objective for the painting event, in that it was the pattern of accordion folds which I wanted to investigate. Going in with a stream of consciousness approach the folds suggested staircases, which reminded me of a photo I had of moss ridden stairs from a World War II battery off the coast of Washington State. The battery stairs felt filled with echoes, so for the small construction, I searched for text to express the sense of voices long gone. 

Rilke, one of my favorite poets, is one I often go to, and in a collection of his works I found a poem “Fragments of an Elegy,” with the lines: “Once poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice can outshout the rattle of this metallic age that is struggling on toward its careening future?” The words, battlefield, rattle, metallic age, careening future were a perfect fit for the construction in my mind. So, part of the folds on the front incorporate text from the poem and the back has the complete section of the part of the poem I cut up to use on the front.

Finally, some of the paintings get more philosophical: “Gnossienne,” “Vertical Fiction,” “Day for Night,” “The Way In is Out,” all seem to have something to say about the nature of being and human existence. The word gnossienne was originally coined by Eric Satie as a title for his piano compositions of the late 19th century. Although one could have used the title of the show “Shape Shift” for the painting, I ended up calling the painting “Gnossienne “ as I felt more depth was added by using that word. Like Satie’s piano compositions, which were experimental and written in freeform, the painting, although it appears measured, is not. The angles were adjusted freeform, through a felt sense of space. And like the piano compositions, the painting experiments with form, structure, and rhythm with its tilting, spiraling

effect.

 The word gnosis, to know, is embedded in gnossienne, and Gnosticism, which Satie was involved with, implies an inner knowing, an engagement more ineffable than explicable, as well as, a dualistic cosmology. The dark/light structure of the painting, reflects this Gnostic orientation, as well as the transparent triangles, which immediately bring to mind the work of New Mexico’s Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-42, whose members were concerned with tapping into a higher spiritual dimension of human nature. The central vertical stripes were actually appropriated from a Transcendental Painting Group member, Raymond Jonson’s minimalistic stripe painting from the 1960s, but the stripe’s colors are different. Also his painting had transparent half circles at the top and bottom, which I replaced with gradated triangles and split one of the stripes into two inward pointing arrows. From the word “Gnossienne” as the title for the painting, a historical connection is made suggesting inner knowledge as a way to awakening. I had no idea of any of this when starting the painting. It only became apparent as the painting neared completion and was not really fully realized until I started to think about a title.

I will close with “Vertical Fiction” since it is the largest painting in the room. The painting does have a lot to do with spatial perception, using various forms of perspective, texture, and color value gradations to create illusion. Text reappears again in this painting in the vertical stripes and looking closely one might see words like Plato, weaving, symbolism, that appear faded, almost ghost-like, just whispers. The painting is structured with brackets suggesting different planes, framing or holding a contemplative space with a semi-atmospheric grid suggesting a Japanese Shoji screen, as well as meditative Agnes Martin paintings with their grid structures. 

I called this painting “Vertical Fiction.” Obviously, because the painting is vertical and the viewer stands vertical to the painting. Fiction, because of the text and the illusive structural properties of the space in the painting. I added the horizontal chartreuse bar as the painting felt staid, proper, and needed something to disrupt and enliven it. The bar floats in front of the painting, almost into the room to invite the viewer in. Yet it also functions as a bar that blocks entrance. If it simultaneously blocks and invites, I wondered what does that mean? I don’t understand.

 I decided it would be appropriate to throw the I Ching since there was a kind of Zen aesthetic to the painting, as well as, the psychologist Carl Jung used the I Ching to sometimes access the subconscious. I was so surprised when the I Ching gave me the hexagram, the “Arousing” or (Shock). The chartreuse colored bar certainly functioned as a shock in the painting. Within the comment on the hexagram it said: “If you find yourself threatened by circumstances”, I thought, yes, I do, with all that’s going on in the world right now…”[then] withdraw into stillness and meditation.” So this is what the painting is trying to tell me which I thought useful advice considering the present situation of global conflict. Of course, one doesn’t need to throw the I Ching to know what this painting is saying. But, it was delightful and fun to get the confirmation, as if opening a door to a magical world.

So that gives you the gist of some of the thoughts behind what you see in a few of the paintings on the wall. I was once asked what do you hope a viewer walks away with when they look at your art? To which I said, just to see more art. And I will add to that, painting in particular. I think it is such a beautiful, inspiring, medium with so many possibilities, and just so satisfying and fun to contemplate.

Eccentric Geometries 

Artist Statement 3/2024

My show Eccentric Geometries continues the exploration of the shaped canvas or panel as a painting object.  It takes the idea of the rectangular stretcher and extends the “stretcher bars” outside the picture plane in various directions allowing the painting or construction to grow into space.  Architectural thought organizes the inside/outside pictorial space while gestures of modernist painting and design define the surface.  Material and process also factor in and are essential to the schematics of the painting.

By noticing, feeling the interactions between shape, color, line, brushstroke, texture an ordered sequence mysteriously emerges that makes the painting’s structure cohere.  Abstraction is used as a reflection of mind, with geometric imagery conveying a personal and felt exploration of the processes of illusion and perception. Intentions are provisional; futility anticipated.  In a dialogue between painter and painting, through a call and response process and listening to that which needs to be done, only then is the next step revealed to move forward.  Then, out of an apparent nothing, something evolves. Titles become pointers, winding around that which never becomes any particular thing but itself— a unique eccentric presence.

I am fascinated with the New Mexico’s 1930’s Transcendental Painting Group’s belief that the most important role of art was to provide access to a realm of knowing beyond ordinary consciousness. Taking this a step further is the idea of an invisible framework for existence and that out of an apparent chaos there is an unknown order that can be tapped. Each eccentrically shaped painting/construction is a demonstration and reflection of that hypothesis.

SWC Interview Questions: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2022

1.  Since submitting for consideration, what has been the most significant catalyst for growth in your practice? Has anything changed in your process, materials, or immediate interests? (If we were doing a studio visit tomorrow, what would you show me first?)

My solo exhibition, Out of the Blue, at Exhibit 208 in March has been the most significant catalyst for growth. Being able to see all the paintings from the past year and a half together in a single space is like finally being able to hear, see the concert performed. Since I work intuitively and without a preconceived plan, it amazes me how everything came together as a meaningful, cohesive whole. Not understanding how this could be, invites me to dig deeper into how meaning arises. Also this show was the first to really focus on color, and it demonstrated to me, that on a technical level, this is definitely a direction I want to refine.

Everyone viewed the show with a different framework of perception, and so the exhibition became a great opportunity to cross paths with those whose thinking was very different from my own. New ways of approaching the work were brought up to consider. Viewers often found it intriguing how each piece could be so unique and yet undeniably part of a single body of work. The conclusion was nothing could be pinned down and this sense of shifting possibilities generates avenues for growth— a kind of divergent evolution rather than the usual convergence around a single objective has become the path for moving forward.

Probably the most important change in my process and interest now is to document each session of painting and track both the interior thought processes and exterior painting changes that occur at each session. Painting has often been referred to as a form of mentality. In its subjectivity a painting can reflect nuanced states of being, making manifest intuitive thought processes that have yet to be put into words, the invisible visible. I have become most curious about identifying the original motivation and then the point at which that motivation is tossed to the wind or forgotten and something unexpected and exciting emerges.

2. Where in 2022 can we send readers to see/engage with your art? Who are you looking forward to collaborating with?

Instagram allows readers to engage with a kind of behind the scene view of what’s going on in my studio weekly and my website offers a more complete history of the work as a whole. Actual paintings can be seen at Exhibit 208 in Albuquerque.

3. How do you identify within the lineage of “New Mexico artists” or “New Mexico painters”? How do you see yourself as a NM artist particularly (or do you)?

I see myself as both a NM artist and an American artist. NM can be viewed as the birth place of Modernist abstraction in this country in the early twentieth century, and it is what initially drew me to move out here. I also found resonance with many of the ideas and concerns of the short lived Transcendental Painting Group formed in 1938 here in NM. In particular, unlike the Surrealists, curiously the TPG saw the subconscious not as a source of archetypal images, but as a portal to a numinous realm of order and meaning. Raymond Jonson wrote: “Purity of vision indicates a sense of heightened order, resulting from the impact of an emotional or mental comprehension, or both, visualized from the inner self...”. There is something about New Mexico that seems conducive to a complete freedom of mind and feeling, which in turn, allows for a receptivity of being that transcends the familiar and habitual realm of conditioned existence. There is a natural order underlying everything to be tapped. Not only do I identify with many of the formal attributes of paintings done by the TPG, but primarily their belief that the most important role of art was to provide access to a realm of knowing beyond ordinary consciousness.

Questions submitted by: Lyndsay Knecht

LUCY MAKI

Out of the Blue

Artist Statement 3/2022

The exhibition Out of the Blue comprises works completed from 2021-2022 and continues to explore concepts related to the shaped canvas as an image/object—from small dimensional paintings to large flat, shaped canvases. Approaches from Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism, Minimalism, Cubism and New Mexico’s Transcendental Painting Group are integrated with a variety of materials (paint, wood, fabric, paper, and/or miscellaneous mixed media), to conjure a uniquely varied presence for each painting. Geometric structures combine with painterly techniques and/or felt surfaces to balance hardedge with gesture and touch.

Two groups of small paintings, Labyrinthine Constructs and Building Space, feature a motif of an actual raised bar to explore ambiguities present in the perception of space. With Labyrinthine Constructs, the only way out, i.e. the resolution of the painting, comes about when the raised vertical bar “dissolves” into the picture plane which symbolically, or metaphorically, could be a stand in for the dissolution of the small self in the ground of being. With Building Space the vertical raised bar functions in opposition to the picture plane, emphasizing and building the space between actual and illusion, while the composition itself, with its chevron patterning, alludes to buildings — city highrises.

How do we know what is real, where is it from, and what is it are questions to play with from painting to painting. Each begins from a “don’t know” point of view and it is through an intuitive process of painting that a nonverbal understanding is reached, to be put in words upon reflection. Titles of the larger works (Through the Looking Glass, Facets, Tomorrow Remembers Yesterday, Sunrise/Sunset, Catwalk, Unscripted, Pretzel Logic and The Transcendentalist) indicate ways of perception and/or ways of being and point to perceptual realizations connected with abstract shape representations. The title of the show, Out of the Blue, brings to mind a focus on color and the arising of works unexpectedly and without preconceptions. (And on a personal level “out of the blue” characterizes the zeitgeist of the past two years.) All in all, allusions intertwine with illusions to give an air of mystery to otherwise formally elegant work.