Born in 1953, Alison Weld grew up in Rochester, NY. As a youth, her most profound experiences were being inspired by the art at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery during frequent family visits to Buffalo. Realizing early that she would be an artist, she earned a BFA from SUNY, Alfred and an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Immediately upon completing her SAIC course work, she moved to New York to build her life in art.
Always grounded in her identity as a woman artist, Weld has imbued her art with a passionate engagement in life. She sees her work as a visual diary, constantly revealing her personal responses to the visual environment.
Her art has been consistently based in expressive abstraction in which ideas, emotions, and experience find form through mark and movement, palette and structure, ground and surface. It has actively developed a range of strategies that express the complex dynamics of her personal sense of self in relation to the visual richness of the social and natural worlds.
The physical, social, and spiritual dimensions of her sense of selfhood call upon the essence of abstraction–sightlines and formal relationships among color, structure, surface, texture—to establish original and appropriate forms of particularizing the immediacy of life experiences while presenting a vision of totality.
Throughout her career, her distinct series frequently direct our focus to the relationships of similarity and apparent disparity within a single work or among immediate juxtapositions or multiple components of 2,3,5,7, even 78 originally single works conjoined into composite assemblages. The result is a singularity of creative vision bringing apparent discord into concord.
The work of Alison Weld is in twenty public collections across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Mid-West, and the South. It’s been exhibited nationally, the subject of more than 30 solo exhibitions, and over 100 group exhibitions.
Photograph of the artist by Tom Stock, 2022
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"I created neo-expressionist paintings on plastic shower curtains that brought female domestic life physically and metaphorically into the art world. I loved their size that provided expansive ground for a strength of identity and visual consciousness."
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"Finding parallel artistic expressions of beauty arising through seeming discord, in the 1990s I often listened to jazz when I was painting, especially to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. I now paint in silence."
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AMONG THE TREMBLING LEAVES, 2009Mixed media on wood panels24 x 87 in. (61 x 221 cm)(AWd 17) -
"I look from left to right much like I read and write. Each panel is the equivalent of a page, a page of my life, a page of my autobiography. I see my dots as energy. I see my dots as resultant of the life force. This is a force of repetition and a density of passion. The organic imagery sings of embodied life and the ethereal soul. I offer it humbly and without stopping."
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"Sinfonia Descendant is monumental in scale, yet intimate in its imagery ... I began with small gesso boards whose scale represented a dramatic narrowing of available ground ... Their size led me to employ a technique related to the monoprint. First laying a strong, multi-hued form on a gesso board, I pressed another board onto its surface creating a slightly varied reverse image, and then pressed additional boards against either one."
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"Migratory Continuo #5 is from my Tonal Variation series ... Tonal Variation works found their origins in my past creations and looked to the future. They constitute a series of assemblages of previously created canvases assembled anew as a form of autobiography. I sometimes changed their orientation. I sometimes put together works that were decades old with works that were more recent or even just created."
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"My paintings work to be both intensely physical and spiritually expressive. Their abstraction arises from and responds to the power–and beauty–of color and marks. They declare that a painting’s surface is a film of consciousness and that abstraction is visual philosophy."
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"Named for my realization that the richness of color and light is often felt as if it were silent music, the painting’s vibrant surface resonates deeply within. Its cadmium red, white, and black palette evokes the essential beauty of an emotive state."
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"Lake Soliloquy is my inner thought and my response to the outer realm of physical being. Here in the Adirondacks, the environment beyond the surrounding field is a grand lake and beyond that the mountains and, always, the sky."
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"Here the surface reveals that it is the record of an emergence of consciousness through the strata of thought, color, and action."
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"The relative light and airiness of Adirondack Song 6 make particularly evident the creative dance of my pressing and pulling that brings forth unplanned visual responses to challenge and delight."
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"In Silent Song 9 the white and black denote a polarity of being, within which a single red mark orients the entire field of composition within a suggestive framing of black marks around the painting’s edges."
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"The black and red expressive marks move explosively through the white expanse outward toward the edges of the painting, toward the source of vision and beyond.
It evokes the celestial realms of the spirit–both that of the creator and of the viewer."
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"Our Land asks us to ponder; What hovers before us in the landscape, the sky-scape, the mind-scape?"
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"The Field of Being series are abstractions expressive of a sensed fullness of being and a particular response to a life currently lived within a visually dramatic environment."
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The Book
