Karla Wozniak, “Heavy Weather”
by DeWitt Cheng
Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through November 2, 2024
October 19, 2024
Karla Wozniak, “Emerald City,” 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 38”.
All images courtesy of Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco.
The nine recent abstract paintings by Karla Wozniak brim with energy, brilliantly orchestrated color, and fearless improvisation. They belie their somewhat ominous exhibition title, “Heavy Weather.” The works’ hopeful and optimistic optical and emotional effects on us could hardly be more ironic — or am I projecting? For example, “Emerald City” with its Cubist/Surrealist figures, makes us pay attention to the personnages behind the curtain of reality.
The artist, a native Californian who studied back east before returning to the Bay Area in 2015, has always been influenced by her surroundings, incorporating commercial signage during her years in upstate New York, and lush, verdant mountainscapes during a stint in east Tennessee. Back in the Bay Area, she has touched base with local artist ancestors who bridged figuration and abstraction in the years immediately following the Second World War, including Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Jess, Roy De Forest, and others with whom Wozniak shares an exuberant, comic spirit.
Karla Wozniak, “Night Tangle,” 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 14 x 11”.
The title of the show is thus employed ironically. Wozniak’s playful spirit survived even the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 and its isolating effects: her daughter’s kindergarten quarantine and the artist’s own enforced teaching of painting via Zoom (at California College of the Arts). Wozniak’s pandemic confinement to the house led her to abandon painting and color for six months, and to make hundreds of drawings instead. Working from instinct while watching kid’s television, in a contemporary version of the automatic drawing method pioneered by the Surrealists, she returned to her easel with a fresh eye.
The paintings that emerged from those sketches have a playful, naive quality inspired by the artist’s daughter — and that reflect the fearless self-expression of Wozniak’s aforementioned Bay Area forebears. Also emerging in “Heavy Weather” are the stamp of European modernists such as Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Hilma af Klint. Wozniak also describes how “Childhood imagination and play is magical to witness. As an artist I’m always reaching for that state of play, those unusual connections that children make and the worlds they construct. I want my paintings to hold that wonder.”
Karla Wozniak, “Winter Glow,” 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 38”.
The color and wonder returned to Wozniak’s paintings in 2022, brilliant as ever, but also enriched. After Wozniak's pandemic period explorations of drawing and color theory, the paintings we see are now loaded with phenomenological power and psychological affect that lends them both formal and emotional unity. Also new are flattened perspective and spatial ambiguities that further celebrate Cézanne and Cubism. Long, looping shapes outline what appear to be vistas into alternate realities.
Karla Wozniak, “Shattered Landscape,” 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 38”.
“Shattered Landscape” may have originated in sketches of the artist’s toy-bestrewn household, but with its multi-hued, irregularly shaped patches, each adorned by stylized trees, plants, rainstorms, furrows and waves, it becomes a landscape, perhaps shattered, but in recovery. Nature finds a way.
Karla Wozniak, “Underwater Jump Rope,” 2023 acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 38”.
“Underwater Jump Rope” continues the land-of-counterpane patterning of dots, dashes, stripes and stippling, but overlays seven parallel sine-wave lines, each in a different color, evoking multiple views both above and below the waterline. A tropical-fruit palette unifies the patterned fields — the term alluding to Charles Burchfield, the visionary painter of Gardenville, New York, yet another Wozniak influence — and stylized fruit and vegetable motifs of “Lemon Lime.”
Karla Wozniak, “Lemon Lime,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60”.
Wozniak’s paintings prove again that originality can grow from tradition, thoughtfully assimilated. As Ben Shahn once observed, one need not consider the artists of the past as oppressive enemies to be rejected (or vanquished) outright, but as helpful, whispering friends. This “Heavy Weather” suite of paintings benefit from the friends and family that she communed with during our time of greatest isolation.
