To Elizabeth Gilfilen, the blank canvas is an urgent lure. She doesn’t want to begin; she has to begin. Gilfilen starts her paintings by setting up an atmospheric color that defines the mood of the work. Without a defined palette for each piece, she reacts to the fields of color as she works and selectively integrates new hues that expand on the expected potential color combinations. Gilfilen uses color to provoke our private discomforts and public visual pleasures. Her paintings share a sense of imperativeness, a result of her style of creating art that reflects her openness to chance and accident.
Elizabeth Gilfilen is also uniquely interested in spatial complexity and layering. Her generous use of negative space serves to enhance the raw power that comes from the core of the painting. While the activity within Gilfilen’s paintings can be fierce and active, a closer look reveals great restraint and a very concise, specific set of visual cues that she uses to create these abstract representations. Her paintings can appear volatile and deliberate at the same time and piecing that puzzle together results in paintings that are anything but arbitrary.
One of Gilfilen’s earliest memories of art making was making a little book about the story of the chicken and the egg and which came first. For her, painting is much like that age-old question in that she continually questions where the impulse to paint comes from. Does it come from something that she saw or felt that needs to be represented in a creative form or does the actual process of painting create the impulse? In Gilfilen’s case, it doesn’t matter which came first because the inspiration to paint is embedded within her and remains the driving force in her ongoing exigency to create art. No longer, no later is an apt and poignant description of Elizabeth Gilfilen’s process.
Elizabeth Gilfilen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her BFA from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She recently finished a residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and has participated in exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT and The Bronx Museum of Art. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.