Alison Weld has been an abstract painter for more than 30 years. She believes that her work is a visual diary; revealing responses to both the natural and social worlds. Weld looks to abstraction—either creating her works or contemplating those of others—for evidence of a passionate response to life. Searching out the abstract present in all artworks, the artist takes in thoughts of color and line, movement and proportion, surface and scale, ultimately asserting that abstraction is visual philosophy—however intuitive and silent it may appear.
She employs both density as well as openness in her works on paper. In these works, she embraces either a state of a fully-worked ground or welcomes the simplicity and sparseness of the paper itself. Many of these works on paper relate to her painting diptychs, such as Home Economics, 1994-2002, through their juxtapositions of an overlay of dots, color, line and form. The works are metaphors for contrast and dichotomy, male and female, external and internal forces, themes central to all her art.
Weld received a BFA from the SUNY College of Art and Design at Alfred University and a MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weld’s work has been exhibited nationally and she has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, among them a 2006 mid-career survey at the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio and a 2010 mid-career retrospective at the University of Memphis Art Museum. She is included in the “Feminist Art Base,” the Brooklyn Museum’s website of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.