Paintings 2014-2015

The body of paintings Coit created during 2014-2015 are sprayed oil on canvas. Each piece is worked horizontally – sprayed directionally to control texture and layered to control translucence. The image changes as the viewer alters point of view. This complex approach creates a disorienting, amorphous surface, an uncanny effect. The recent work is a direct response to movement in the sky – to memories of breaking through cloud cover in a single engine plane – to seeing cirrus and the big fat cumulous clouds – tantalizingly gorgeous, disarming and dangerous.

“Coit’s movement from light to shadow begins to take on a temporal quality in two ways. First, these labor- and time-intensive canvases with up to 200 layers are diaristic registers of the artist’s disciplined dedication to works that take several weeks if not months to complete. At the same time, their chromatic variation suggests changes created by the passage of time as tracked by changes in light as we move away from and back to the sun.” - Jennie Hirsh, from “Before and After Language: The Art of Madelin Coit”