The Edge of Ourselves - Becca Day

As an abstract painter, I’m interested in the internal world, and how it can be expressed in visual form. I seek to make peace with unknowing and uncertainty, both in my everyday life and within the process of painting. My work is exploratory and meditative. I paint intuitively, using oil and acrylic paint and gestural marks, employing varying thicknesses of paint and many layers. To form a composition, each mark made informs the next in an intuitive evolution of shape and texture making. A composition feels successful to me when I can create organic abstract forms based on ideas that language doesn’t cover, yet somehow feel familiar.

For this exhibit I explored themes of the edges of ourselves—our visible, corporeal edges and invisible, social-emotional edges. At various times in life, we are soft or hard edged (and both simultaneously)—both can be useful for connection and protection. Both can work against us at times. No matter how much we try to control our edges, in reality, we are permeable. Our physical and emotional boundaries are always being crossed by something—in ways both big and sub-atomically small. We’re also inevitably influenced by our world around us, no matter how hard we try to box in our ideas and preferences. We are changed by simple exposure. On a personal level, I wanted to push to the edges of my creative expression with this collection to play with this theme. I created a few figurative abstract paintings which is a departure from my usual non-objective abstract work. I was mindful of the edges of each shape and mark made as I painted. I aimed to create a balance of soft and hard edges to make compositions that reflect our reality as permeable beings in a world full of created edges.