Abby Kasonik is a
calm, centered presence. You get the sense she’s one of those people who’s
always had a clear vision of what she wants out of life. Kasonik lives with her
boyfriend (antiques dealer, Roderick Coles owner of The Curious Orange Shop) in
the charming house she bought when she moved back to the Charlottesville area
after college.
Abby Kasonik is a calm, centered presence. You get the sense she’s one of those people who’s always had a clear vision of what she wants out of life. Kasonik lives with her boyfriend (antiques dealer, Roderick Coles owner of The Curious Orange Shop) in the charming house she bought when she moved back to the Charlottesville area after college. It’s a chic setting with an unpretentious elegance that suits both the architecture and its owner.
The common theme is clouds in a sky that takes up most of the picture’s real estate. This low horizon line emphasizes the infinity of space and engenders a sense of contemplative peace. It is so exaggerated that it keeps the paintings from being mere derivative iterations of traditional landscape, though there are certainly elements that remind you of van Ruisdael and Turner.
Another unifying element is the rivulets of water Kasonik overlays on the paint. My first impression was rain on a window and thought of being on a train passing through countryside. But the rivulets perform a more important role than evoking precipitation; their real purpose is to keep the work contemporary; to remind you these are not your garden-variety landscape (Kasonik dislikes the classification) paintings. Indeed the “landscapes” aren’t literal; they’re mystical, dreamlike vignettes of the inner topography of the artist’s imagination.
Abby Kasonik is a calm, centered presence. You get the sense she’s one of those people who’s always had a clear vision of what she wants out of life. Kasonik lives with her boyfriend (antiques dealer, Roderick Coles owner of The Curious Orange Shop) in the charming house she bought when she moved back to the Charlottesville area after college. It’s a chic setting with an unpretentious elegance that suits both the architecture and its owner.
The common theme is clouds in a sky that takes up most of the picture’s real estate. This low horizon line emphasizes the infinity of space and engenders a sense of contemplative peace. It is so exaggerated that it keeps the paintings from being mere derivative iterations of traditional landscape, though there are certainly elements that remind you of van Ruisdael and Turner.
Another unifying element is the rivulets of water Kasonik overlays on the paint. My first impression was rain on a window and thought of being on a train passing through countryside. But the rivulets perform a more important role than evoking precipitation; their real purpose is to keep the work contemporary; to remind you these are not your garden-variety landscape (Kasonik dislikes the classification) paintings. Indeed the “landscapes” aren’t literal; they’re mystical, dreamlike vignettes of the inner topography of the artist’s imagination.
It is telling that Kasonik studied sculpture at VCU as the paintings are so textural with surfaces composed of so many layers they almost appear three-dimensional. Fresh out of college, Kasonik worked as a furniture restorer using faux finishing techniques to disguise mars and says that she found inspiration in the aged patinas she came in contact with.
Kasonik’s process is laborious. She builds up her surfaces with alternating layers of acrylic paint and a glaze of clear pigment. In between layers she uses water almost like an eraser to help form clouds, trees, land mass, etc. When she’s satisfied with the image, she takes a squirt bottle and sprays water in a pattern of even lines that run down the panel before sealing it within the glaze coat. She repeats these steps through many, many layers. The results are luscious. Both surface and depth are emphasized; the image remains intact and smooth behind a watery undulating curtain of line.
Kasonik says she wants to achieve the effect of hard candy, which has a shiny exterior but is translucent so you can see into its depths. Like the candy she references, her work is beautiful but it has a psychological weight that takes it beyond mere beauty and makes it so very satisfying.
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