Deborah Dancy is a multi-media artist, whose work includes paintings, drawings, photography, and small sculptures.
Her work is an investigation of abstraction’s capacity to engage beauty and tension without justification or narrative. Within her paintings and works on paper, references are suggested, not identified; meaning is organic since images mingle, shift, and position themselves within a field of agitated or flat color. Within these works, her inspiration springs from diverse sources sponsored, in part, from the views of gnarled and jagged trees and bark from the woodlands surrounding her home, discarded shards of construction debris, and constant encounters with the internal and external world. In this odd combination of elements, the initial mark prompts Dancy’s starting point. Hesitation and agitation of brush strokes within the gesture is revealed as content. Incompleteness- the unfinished fragment of what - “almost was” and “might become” amplifies meaning. In this orbit, painting explores what Dancy considers as embracing the unpredictable and accidental. Accepting this means assumptions are suspended and discoveries may emerge. This edge of conflict and sequence of processes, including scraping and repainting, fresh forms, and constructed imagery, becomes the elemental act of painting.
“I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.” -- Anne Carson