Discovery Linescapes

Carol Sears

September 10 - October 8, 2011

Selected Works

Carol Sears is anything but commonplace.

Rarely are contemporary artists considered emerging after five decades of practice. Even rarer do artists exhibit the combination of talent, skills, belief and tenacity to remain dedicated to honing their craft long enough to experience the breakthrough—that quintessential moment when an artist transcends imitation to work in a voice all their own. But not all artists are Carol Sears.

Carol Sears opens her solo exhibition Discovery Linescapes on September 10, 2011, 6-11 pm, at AndrewShire Gallery in Los Angeles.

For Discovery Linescapes, Sears employs graphite, oils and oil sticks on canvas, producing gestural abstract landscapes in which highly personalized idiomatic hieroglyphs are interspersed with empty fields of color. Sometimes dense and sometimes airy, the coded appearance of Sears’ forms is both charged and tranquil as her scrawled shapes schematically spread across her paintings. Calligraphic, muted colored expanses, erasures and unabashed negative spaces make and break the tension for a strikingly balanced work. This complex compositional discovery appears to come naturally and with ease to the artist—but in fact, it is the product of a nearly fifty year quest of committed artistic practice, patience and discovery. Evoking the rare reductive precision of Twombly and Matisse, Sears’ new work is a pure distillation of the cumulative techniques she has appropriated and mastered throughout her five decade-long career of practicing art.