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[title]Sometimes all you can recall of your dreams are flashes of vivid color, emotions and a couple of vague details. Kim Piotrowski’s new mixed-media paintings hover in the elusive realm between dreams and waking life. Mostly abstract, her works contain only hints of figuration and lots of gorgeous, carefully composed color: plumes of orange, swirls of cyan, splashes of olive and fire-engine red.
Sometimes all you can recall of your dreams are flashes of vivid color, emotions and a couple of vague details. Kim Piotrowski’s new mixed-media paintings hover in the elusive realm between dreams and waking life. Mostly abstract, her works contain only hints of figuration and lots of gorgeous, carefully composed color: plumes of orange, swirls of cyan, splashes of olive and fire-engine red.
It’s fitting that about half her pieces depict beds—one of the themes the Riverside-based artist explored in 2010. In her large-scale Pillow Road, she tucks two satiny pillows into a bedspread composed of Rothko-esque layers of brown and red paint that span the width of the piece. Colors explode above the pillows, suggesting the mind remains active even when the body’s at rest.
Piotrowski created Pillow Road’s long sweeps of paint using several paintbrushes taped together, a trick that reflects her imaginative approach to materials. Flashe, gouache, enamel pens, markers and gold and silver leaf on Yupo (a type of synthetic paper) create variations in texture and composition. The artist takes digital photos of her paintings at various stages and does manual tests before applying different colors.
Reflecting the other half of the exhibition’s title, Piotrowski presents small-scale studies of a revolver: one black against a white background, another bright blue against brown. The larger Arm in Arm in Arm leaves a revolver atop an amorphous mound of riotous color, indicating the powerful emotions this object arouses.
Yet the bed-themed works provide more room for interpretation. Unlike hazy dreams, these paintings stick with you.