Sunday Pick: Gabriella Boyd

Bananas, 2012

Ripe, 2012

Girl Cruising, 2012

Two Tables, 2011

In the last few weeks I came across the work of Gabriella Boyd.  Finding her work gave me this overwhelming, ecstatic, sense of relief.  It's a hard feeling to explain, unless you are a painter yourself and have experienced it first hand -- but the feeling of seeing a painting that reflects your own sentiments visually is one of the most exciting and relieving I have experienced.  It's as if the painter is walking out of the painting and saying, "I get you and everything you are trying to do", and from there you could just talk for hours about seeing and painting.

  Of course, my paintings are different than Boyd's, but her interest in pattern, color, odd spatial and figurative relationships just give me faith in my own attempts at painting.  Her paintings play on the edges of reality and I love them for that.  She is the kind of painter that pops into my mind in the studio and I feel a renewed sense of confidence (like I felt when I first saw Kyle Staver's work).  There is a nice Huffington Post article on her work, her influences and her thoughts on her work here.