Posted Mar 11th, 2008 in Featured Artists. Get notified of updates by email.
Today’s featured artist is Jax Chachitz, an international painter who has lived and worked both in New York and Germany. Her art is completely abstract expressionist in style—and yet—fascinatingly full of subconscious imagery.
Jax’s paintings tease the imagination, making you WANT to find shapes, meaning, and figures whether they’re really there or not.
One of the ways she enhances her paintings’ ambiguity is by balancing positive and negative shapes in her work. In the painting below she’s taken three main colors (black, white, and pink) and used them all fairly equally, giving viewers the chance to “see” something in any one of them.
Jax’s work is also incredibly dynamic and alive, with never a straight line or a square angle to be found. Every stroke of color is brushed on at odd degrees, in random sections, or haphazardly splattered in the corners.
You’ll also notice that by minimizing blending, Jax pulls some colors forward while pushing others back, creating depth and 3-dimensionality in her paintings despite her non-representational style.
There’s not much else that I can say about these specific pieces without pushing my own ideas into the mix—after all, what I see in her paintings may be completely different from your own take on them.
But of course that’s the point, isn’t it?
So look long and hard at this next painting. What jumps out at you? What pulls your eyes in or shoves them away? What sparks your own imagination?
Perhaps it’s the color, the contrast, the shapes or forms. Maybe it’s the movement and energy of the piece, or the feel of the brush on the canvas so long after it’s been gone. . . There’s so much take in, if you just let yourself look.
To see more of Jax Chachitz’s artwork, including paintings on both plexiglass and paper, please take a moment to visit her website at AtelierJax.com.
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