Barbara Bilotta considers herself an Abstract Expressionist, and her vibrant paintings certainly have the visual and emotional power that is so much a part of that school of painting. The striking abstract patterns in her works are more than just arrangements of colors and shapes. Her love of nature animates those patterns, forging a connection between pure abstraction and organic forms. Thanks to that link, a flowing arrangement of colors will also evoke the textures found in a rock’s surface or a body of water. There is an elemental strength in her images that grounds them, setting up a contrast with the artist’s dynamic use of colors and shapes. “My goal,” she says, “is to transform the natural order into a suggestive interpretation to stimulate the imagination.”
Much of that interpretation is rooted in Bilotta’s color palette. “I love everything that is brilliant and incredible,” she says, “and I attempt to incorporate it into my work.” This transmits itself through the bright blues, glowing yellows and intense reds that often punctuate her
images, drawing the viewer’s eye into the patterns she creates. But the painter also expertly uses a whole range of subtler shades, rendering soft fields of pastel color that fade into white, or areas of rich browns and blacks. She says that one of her aims is to bring out “a beautiful interplay of light and shadows,” and is it is this which gives her images a palpable sense of physicality, even at their most abstract.
The surface of Bilotta’s paintings is also the result of an intriguing contrast. She works mostly in acrylics glazed with resin, and notes that the acrylic’s softness and the resin’s hardness combine to create a “charged atmospheric space” in which the viewer is made to feel the movement of the paint. That sensation pulls us strongly into her works, and makes the world she depicts a highly compelling one. The artist, who has shown her work widely, divides her time between Long Island and Miami.
