Mary Weatherford’s Yellow on Yellow from 2017 is a superb example of the artist’s unique painterly practice and her contemporary revisitation of the traditions of American abstraction. The canvas grounds are prepared with white gesso mixed with marble dust, and then worked on with Flashe paint, resulting in a unique amalgamation of textures ranging from a translucent sweep to matte impasto. On the surface of the present work, a gestural sprawl of yellow hues is slashed through with a flourescent glow of canary neon, creating a dynamic interplay of light and colour.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Weatherford has long been experimenting with sculptural elements in her paintings, incorporating organic sea debris such as seashells and sponges in the 1990s and early 2000s, and later working with ivy vines. Neon rods first appeared in Weatherford’s works following her t.mes as a visiting artist at California State University at Bakersfield. The artist was intrigued by the coloured neon signs of old factories and restaurants which she encountered as she drove around the small city, and in 2012 she began The Bakersfield Project, which was her first cycle of neon paintings. Weatherford screws the neon rods directly into the canvas, connecting them to the large magnetic transformers on the floor using thin wires. The vivid glow of the industrial lights adds unique emanating lines across the painted surface, at t.mes s with a blinding brightness that leads the viewer with lingering afterimages. Expanding the expressive potential of light, Weatherford’s neons move away from their consumerist connotations, and become a form of abstract, pictorial drawing.
“Every colour hits an emotional note. But the note, the colour with another colour next to it, then makes a chord.... So when I’m making a painting, what I’m doing is demonstrating what the chord progression feels like.”
Image/Artwork: © Gagosian
In her paintings from 2017-18, Weatherford focuses on her responses to her immediate surroundings and current events, describings
them as aspiring to the function of earlier history paintings. In 2020, Weatherford’s first survey exhibition, Canyon – Daisy – Eden, a collects
ion of works from the past thirty years, opened at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. The survey exhibition later travelled to SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2021. In 2021 Weatherford was also the recipient of the Aspen Award for Art.