Kathleen Kucka

Since the early 1990's Kathleen Kucka has been investigating and working with the process of mark making and abstraction. In 1994, he started to sew and burn his canvases, using everyday elements like hot plates and irons to create burns and gestures on the canvas. Kucka deliberately emptied the paintings of actual paint, and focused on the surface: the fabric/canvas, support structure of painting. 

After five years of burning and sewing, Kathleen Kucka was ready to apply paint, and  continued to explore mark making and the materiality of surface through the watery uncontrollable medium of acrylic paint. Like a scientist, he is experimenting with the characteristics of fluid dynamics. See more;

"Acrylic paint can take many forms. It can be thinned out like watercolor, or poured thickly; when dry, it becomes a plastic skin. Once I started using paint, it was clear that the challenge was about the desire for control, and the clashing with reality of loss of control. This balance has become the corner stone of my paintings.

By pouring acrylic paint and manipulating the movement, the works embrace a sense of unknowing and improvisation. A celebration of the accidental.  In my most recent paintings, the forms created by the paint itself are pointing in a new direction. Through the pouring process, shapes emerge that reference fluid dynamics and motion in nature. Radiating structures, moving out from a central axis, take on the chartacteristics of living cell forms. The natural world at its most basic influences the painting process. The paint flows: creating mini rivers, churning rhythms and collisions." - Kathleen Kucka