Boxall 2021 Flip

Intelligent Abstraction

Alone, you dream in several colors: Blue, wishing, and following the river. In company, you dream in several others The time you don’t have. The time left over. And the time it takes. Li-Young Lee from The Undressing , 2018 1

This push-pull between conscious-unconscious is palpable when she is clearly experimenting with different mark-making methods as seen in BLACK LICORICE where washes of color layer in veils beneath the heavy paint strokes and pours of black. This is particularly visceral in TREAD, the painting where Boxall says she realized she could control the pours. 2 One can feel the constant shift and labor of Boxall as she responds to the different directions of the composition. The thick passages of white latex that fall straight before sloping to the sides is given expanse by the ultramarine passages. All is anchored by the splashes of maroon and the faint stains of Payne’s grey deep in the ground. On the surface Boxall combs the paint, leaving the trace of human presence on the canvas as clearly as a sneaker tread in moist earth. This negotiation of the intuitive and the intentional leads to a new phase of work created in the second half of 2020. With these paintings, inspired by the landscapes of a cross-country road trip, she has reached a new plateau: she constructs the image intentionally as reflections of her instinctive elements which served as the foundation for the earlier works. In the expansive, hazy landscapes of SUN ON THE OCEAN and WALDEN, Boxall paints these tender moments that, in the past, have hit the canvas immediately as her automatic response to the canvas’s empty space. 3 Born in Ottawa, Katherine Boxall completed her MFA at San Francisco Art Institute and moved to Charlotte in the summer of 2018, settling immediately into a studio space in a west side warehouse. There she has been constructing large-scale canvases, beginning with a ground of lush oil pastels—often exploding with saturated color, sometimes crusted over with patches of acrylic skin poured onto the surface.

Every action, consciously and not, is a balance between instinct and deliberation. We are born with an essence that is crafted and mannered according to the society and times in which we live. As we mature, our first reaction may not be the one others see; instead, we act on the intention that has been filtered and revised according to the morals and mores layered atop our minds, like so many screens, until the strata is so thick, we cannot even detect the original impulse. Or maybe, as Carl Jung theorized, there is a shared primordial essence, a collective unconscious, that unites all humans, but remains unrealized by most. If Jung’s theory is true and one were to extract some element, pull it through the many layers to the surface, would others inherently recognize the unburied essence, the faintly familiar vision? Not a burst of recognition, but a slowly unfurling a-ha moment? Katherine Boxall explores this possibility of transferring the unconscious onto her canvases through a more automatic practice, trying to loosen her conscious control of her arm as she draws her compositions onto her canvases. Modulating and modifying those initial marks, she reworks them into complicated compositions that balance the intuitive and the intentional, until she achieves mélange of the two concepts.