Going with the artistic flow

You wouldn’t walk by the small Art Factory Gallery these days without being literally drawn in by the intense colors of the paintings hanging on its walls.
Your gaze is immediately caught by the depiction of dynamic water movement by Márta Kucsora (pictured) on the one side, and to the other, a mesmerizing abstract convolution of paints, by Suzan Woodruff, in which a voluptuous red prevails.
These two artists’ works are representative, in a nut shell, of the so-called flow art movement, a term coined in 2003 by the American art historian Peter Frank, when he referred to a handful of Californian artists, which included Woodruff. Their common ground is depicting nature and natural phenomena in an abstract manner, while closely observing the laws of physics – the result is often compelling. Woodruff experiments with a new ingenious technique that creates, in abstract terms, beautiful meditative landscapes. She allows, at first, acrylic paint to flow on a flat wooden surface, controlling its direction by spinning it, tipping it, while observing the laws of gravity.

Suzan Woodruff

The next stage of her sophisticated and carefully controlled method is to actually stop the paint, making it dry where she wishes. “As artists, women have made strong statements, we don’t have to paint cute animals and beautiful flowers. It is very exciting to be able to come with something new,” said Woodruff at the Art Factory Gallery, where I met her and Kucsora one recent morning, and where the largest of her abstractions, executed as an exception on regular canvas, powerfully suggest feminine sexuality. In that sense, Woodruff’s work is also inspired by her feminist ideas, and she sees her role model in artists like Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), who, like her, pioneered intrinsically feminine abstract painting, while she drew much of her inspiration from the American southwest, where Woodruff was born.Tacitly, the works also suggest Woodruff’s ecological concerns. She explained her worries but also her “soft” approach in voicing them. “It is important to make a statement about nature. In the US, we lose the National Parks to big corporations who use them for drilling oil.“The message in my works is more subtle and more compelling, and you can’t turn away from it. I got the clue from Hitchcock’s films, which are frightening, but not because of any overt blood or violence. If you are literal, people tend to turn away from you,” said the American artist who confessed to making more “in your face” political art before her trip to India in 2001. It was there, in the colors of the Buddhist robes and the wiping off of the Mandala sand after prayers, that she found the inspiration for interpreting anew the world around her.

Network

The small display at the Art Factory Gallery has not only brought Woodruff to Budapest; at the same time, it is helping Kucsora enter the small network of “flow” artists, which is slowly, but surely, consolidating itself as an international movement. Woodruff first saw the Hungarian artist’s work in March this year at the Art Now Fair in New York City, where the Art Factory showcased its painters, during the Armory Show art week.
Kucsora – by using her own abstract expressionist technique to capture the dynamic energy and movement of water – has been walking unknowingly, it seems, onto the same “flow” path that the Californian artist has been paving.
Despite their very different techniques, with the Hungarian artist working in a more traditional manner by using canvas as her surface and the brush as her tool, the artists’ joint exhibition confirms their common ground. I asked Woodruff what are the elements in Kucsora’s paintings that makes them subscribe to the concept of flow art.
“She also paints by taking notice of nature and of the the forces in physics,” said Woodruff, pointing to a group of three Kucsora canvases which, in greenish-blue shades, depict water movement triggered by an invisible plunge.
Kucsora, who says she feels honored to be considered part of the “flow,” is less political, but is instinctively drawn to nature. “I feel my roots in unspoiled nature and I am totally sad in the city. I feel comfortable when I have no comfort,” said the young Hungarian artist, who listed as her inspiration for the water series the Adriatic Sea in Croatia, photographs taken at the bottom of the sea, and, not least, Bill Viola’s impressive recordings of water, an artist both she and Woodruff admire.
The abstract expressionist Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is another artist Woodruff mentions. “I love his psychological intensity of colors. For me colors are power, which pull out strong emotional feelings from people.”
Standing in front of Woodruff and Kucsora’s paintings, I see what she means, for the instant goose bumps on my skin are not the sort that I get when watching a Hitchcock movie, but from the rare pleasure I feel when seeing art that touches deep in the soul.

Art Factory II Gallery
Markó u 4 (corner with Falk Miksa u), Pest, District V.
Until Oct 8
Mon-Fri 11am - 6pm, Sat 11am - 6pm
www.suzanwoodruff.com
www.martakucsora.hu

Photos by Andreea Anca