Ashley Garrett // Jack Coyne

September 1, 2021

Surrounded by trees and fields, flanked by a brook and coated in natural light, Ashley Garrett’s studio in upstate New York is a laboratory for her vision. On first glance, her countless small, almost postcard-sized paintings done over the last year register as abstract studies for larger work but are all independent efforts to capture the ever-changing landscape around her. In conversation, Garrett revealed her approach to abstract painting from nature, pointing out the optical reality of the living, breathing objects that surround us. Moving water is completely abstract, fully active; individual leaves are never still, and never register as the same group of colors for more than a split second. Patient vision can go beyond catching a momentary impression and capture the living activity of these forms: look up from the base of a tree and pay close attention to the spectrum of colors there. Not only are there the obvious greens, whites, yellows, browns, even blues, but every fleeting color in between as light changes and vibrates. 

From this starting point, Garrett paints, taking in the energy and movement of the scene as a whole. She takes the baton from her eyes and hands it off to her imagination in the studio, working from memory and injecting her fervent abstractions with frequent impossibilities. Some works, like Saltus, are densely woven and impenetrable, operating on the surface of the canvas. There is no clear resting place for the eye, no foreground or background, only peaks and troughs of optical depth provided by the interaction of light with paint. Others, such as Swogan, welcome the viewer in, via easily identifiable forms — one mountain range closer, intersecting another that is farther away. Once entry is gained, navigation is restricted — her works, recognizable at first as true landscapes, are not quite dreamlike, yet also not quite real. There are just enough familiar elements for entry, but past the gate, forms dissolve into mark-making too colorful and entwined for further passage. Step away and begin to re-read the work as a different exercise, one with scaffolding from life but with light and color as its true subject. 

Landscape is not Garrett’s only source of inspiration. Deeply enthralled by myth her whole life, some of her largest scale works funnel ancient tensions. Aegis, one of her largest works, reflects the multifaceted meaning of the title. Under an aegis — under the protection — of a powerful, benevolent source, Garrett moved from the postcard-size scale to a canvas taller than her. The word literally means “violent windstorm” or “to rush or move violently”; her shift of scale from tiny to grand, from minute wrist movement to full torso gesture at this scale reveals her versatility and boldness. With a strong diagonal tension from top left to bottom right, where much of the work’s energy is stored, Garrett portrays the tension of ancient allegory plastically, with swaths of frothy abstraction in between key charged, jagged corner zones.

Stretched to the same scale and aspect ratio, but painted more quickly, is Festoon. Rather than harken to myth, this piece has more worldly ambition, borrowing its abstraction from a bouquet of flowers. Garrett pivots from the heavy, grave gesture of artists like Franz Kline and, painting with the same alacrity, creates passages that flare upward, combined with a palette reminiscent of Rococo. When painting at this speed, her most successful sections are somewhat spare, letting the exposed white of the canvas glow from behind. The ethereal, atmospheric quality these create, combined with the upward trajectory of her brushstrokes, makes for unusually immaterial, celestial abstract work.

A final work, the third in progress at the same scale as Aegis, discards her previous formal strategies and revolves around a large, central, circular gesture. Purposefully inserting an anchor at center, Garrett explained how she now had to negotiate methods of lightening this heavy purple gesture at the center of her canvas. The large movement is evocative of an object, yet she desires to take it and transform it into atmosphere. “How can you make a concrete gesture diaphanous?” she asked, standing in front of the work in progress. From the last time we studied the work together, she had wrapped thin green strokes around the gesture like vines, pushing it back in space while simultaneously lightening the same area with thin washes of surrounding yellow. 

Few of Garrett’s works share the same skeleton. She seeks to challenge herself formally when creating a new image. From the smaller all-over, edge-to-edge works shown at the beginning of our session, to the middle-sized works with balanced structure, and to her largest works, which utilize strong diagonals for visual movement, her approach is experimental and varied. Analysis of work at such different scales is telling as to how Garrett’s creative mind works in separate capacities. When working at a scale larger than her, painting feels more like excavation, guided by body orientation. Peering over a canvas the size of a postcard, she focuses on her vision, challenging her mental energy to interpret her surroundings and migrate them, filtered through her creative lens, onto the surface. 

Garrett, through much practice, is highly adept at working at a small scale. As the Impressionists did — Garrett is in some works certainly an Impressionist — she takes the imagined abstract moment from nature and spawns it onto a relatively small canvas. Her notions of light, and movement of light in a static picture, differ from her predecessors’, as does the way in which she achieves these phenomena: her stroke weaving technique is what makes these pictures so abstract. On a larger scale, the directness of thought to image breaks down for all artists. Some, like Albert Oehlen, attempt to replicate the conditions of small-scale, vision-based painting by using long poles to apply the gesture. No matter what, the problem of having to paint, then back up to review, then return closer to the canvas to apply more marks persists. Garrett’s experimentation at a large scale shows her ability to execute intriguing tensions, yet also to quickly produce light, skyward gestures. It is in these sparser, faster large works that the difficulties between large and small scales will be discarded, as they will constitute disparate elements of her artistic repertoire.

— Jack Coyne