“Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue,” Amy Sillman states, “a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse, or sub-linguistic mumbling…”. Amy Sillman’s
canvases offer glimpses into a subliminal world. Strangely intimate, her abstractions negotiate a space of both ideas and feelings, inflected with an emotional empathy. “In Cliff 1, a family of
mallards is camouflaged between a field of daisies and a bright orange shape that is beginning to dissolve, like a jet’s vapor trail. Striped drapery and a painterly tangle of pastel pinks and baby blues add to the atmosphere of cheery beginnings.” David Pagel. Her paint techniques mirror the convergence of unconscious thoughts: rock rendered with the chalky texture of rubbings, sunset as violent deep orange slashes, birds and flowers with cartoon folly. Amy Sillman paints with a sense of intuitive immediacy, attempting to purposefully broach the fragmented territory of affect, of embarrassment and awkwardness, conveying a sense of
experimentation and discovery within her pensive gestures.