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Rebecca Purdum’s paintings are shifting fields of color that suggest atmospheric space filled with light. The movement in Purdum’s paintings is subtle, often nearly imperceptible, flowing from dark to light and from formless to form. Color moves in micro-tonal steps, with small strokes of individual hues massing to create clouds of colored light. Paradoxically, the artist paints with a real physical directness, usually using her gloved hands to apply marks and layers of pigment. Purdum’s recent paintings emphasize the material reality of paint, with oil color building up a textural presence on the canvas.
Purdum’s art is meditative – the work of reiterative practice, and of realizing the contours of one’s own consciousness. Each of Purdum’s paintings is a kind of existential space of perpetual investigation, emerging awareness, and of hard-won grace. As Michael Kimmelman wrote, “It is almost impossible not to like Rebecca Purdum’s…works, so beautifully painted are they and so tinged with what seems an evanescent light.” The artist has exhibited her paintings at the Tilton Gallery since 1985. Her work was has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Corcoran Gallery of Art.
