Kathy Cantwell “Walking The Line”

The Painting Center

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The Painting Center presents Walking The Line, a solo exhibition of paintings by Kathy Cantwell. In recent years, artist Kathy Cantwell found expressive freedom in the constant of simple stripes. In “Walking Line,” her familiar side-by-side stripes break out, becoming caroming paths in a color field. It’s as if she has transitioned from a classic phase to a more Baroque sensibility in which equipoise becomes dynamic and frontal compositions surrender to diagonals through space. Yet the difference emerges from Cantwell’s divergence from her previous process of setting one extended gesture of varied hue after another. Now after building up a continuous chromatic background made of many layers, she then takes on the more demanding work of making the lines from ten encaustic pigments. The visual movement of the darting lines is offset by the drag of the medium and the visceral sense of focused discipline. The real maneuvering can be observed in the seeming imperfections where colors roughly encroach into each other, where the evidence of the hand reminds us that walking isn’t the shortest distance between two points but the action of putting one foot in front of the other. After working in the music industry in New York City, Kathy Cantwell moved to New Jersey, where she currently lives with her wife and two children. She shows frequently in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, including showings at the Drawing Rooms, Jersey City, NJ; The Dora Stern Gallery, Orange, NJ, Rye Art Center, Rye, NY, the Valley Arts Firehouse Gallery, Orange, NJ; and the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ. Featured multiple times in ProWax Journal, she is with the Adam Peck Gallery, Provincetown, MA, and a member at The Painting Center, NY.