Featured Artist Gina Yu

Featured artist Gina Yu presents a collection of figurative art that bursts with color and spontaneity. See more of her art by visiting her website.

 

 

Check Your Head is the name of a Beastie Boys album and also what I tell myself every time I step into my studio. It’s my nature to be logical, practical and realistic.

 

 

So, I say to myself when I’m about to start a session, “Leave your thinking self at the door.”

 

 

Painting is an emotional journaling, an expressive inhale and exhale, a heart practice.

 

 

Like inhaling and exhaling, abstraction and figurative painting cannot be separated for me. Figure ground integration, one is part of the other.

 

 

When lines lose their edge, when lines do not connect, when lines intimate there is a mass—they speak volumes without having to. Negative space, white space, empty space—fill the paper and complete the figure.

 

 

I find figures to be endlessly fascinating. So much expressed through a tilt of the head, a downward cast of the eyes, a leaning of the hip, a thrust of the shoulder; joy, defiance, uncertainty, boredom—all without saying a word.

 

 

In a fast-paced digital online world, I relish and indulge in the moments in my physical studio with my analog paper and tactile surfaces.

 

 

Although I paint quickly, I am a resident of the slow movement. It is here that time stops and I can connect and reconnect with myself and through my art.

 

 

Instinctual mark-making, gestural slashes, calligraphic strokes, spontaneous frenzy of bright colors with darks, textured gesso and collage of pattern are all expressions of my visual vocabulary.

 

Artist Gina Yu invites you to follow her on Instagram.

 

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