Diversions LA

Dream-like and dazzling, artist Stevie Love creates 3-D wall sculptures that are filled with an almost kinetic energy and bursting with vibrant color. She started experimenting with paint in this way back in her art school days at Claremont Graduate University.

“I’ve used acrylic paint as a sculptural medium for more than 20 years…making large three-dimensional free-form paint objects by pushing the paint around with my hands. Right after graduating I spent some years using squeeze bottles to apply thick paint to rectangular matrices like paper, wood panels, or acrylic panels. I made free-form shapes once in a while. But about five years ago, I began focusing on creating the three-dimensional paint/sculpture hybrids that I am making now.”

Even more recently, she began adding faux fur to the back of each piece “to create an aura. Now I am hooked on the idea and look of the fur in combination with the sculptural paint,” she says. It also “references a pelt, in which case the paint would be the inside or fleshy part of the skin.”

Love wants viewers to be surprised about the work and curious about its construction, as well as “stimulated by seeing something they have never seen before. The combination of sculptural paint and faux fur, and intense colors in combination have a sense of the absurd; playful in a way, but serious in the carefully constructed intentional objectness.”

Always searching for “super bright” colors and colors that play off each other, she seeks to “emphasize the intensity of the differences between them.” She spends days mixing paints and mediums to reach the consistency she wants, primarily selecting Nova Color paints and mediums from pourable gloss to matte to super thick.

“I get a couple of specialty mediums from Golden Paint, like GAC 800 to minimize crazing, and Clear Tar Gel which has a syrupy texture that causes the paint to spread forever making a level surface. The Clear Tar Gel is impossible to control but that’s what makes it interesting – it spreads and pushes outward making unique shapes beyond my control, and there are times I want to take advantage of that.”

She describes herself as “naturally attracted to zingy color combinations. I love the dark and light contrasts in Van Gogh, and paintings by the Fauves have always been favorites of mine. But I also am attracted to the over-the-top, not ‘normal’ color combinations. Hot pink just makes me happy!”

Growing up in Burbank and Los Angeles, her family made trips to border towns, where she absorbed the sheen of colorful buildings and signs that was the norm there.

“We moved around a lot and my Dad always painted our houses pink — not hot pink, but definitely pink,” she laughs.

In regard to her textures, she says she simply enjoys painting sculpturally and “building up shapes and forms based on what comes naturally out of a pastry bag or squeeze bottle. I am a modernist, in that the paint for me can stand on its own as an object in its own right. I like the playfulness of making 3-D forms with the paint. What results is a kind of unnatural nature based in color and form that flows naturally, but makes forms unrelated to the everyday world we see around us.”

Her titles refer to consciousness. “I am thinking of them less as the inside of a body but even deeper into a human’s existence – consciousness, including everyday waking consciousness, sub-consciousness, Jung’s great unconscious, and shared consciousness with all of creation.”

She views the works as existing in a space between painting and sculpture. “They hang on the wall like a painting, but because of their physical form, they exist in the space that the viewer occupies.”

She notes that she often fluctuates between hanging the works against the wall flat, or draping them to call more attendtion to the paint skin.

“This idea conforms to an idea I have about the world being a thin skin – the veil which is pierced when entering another dimension of consciousness. Like my Italian mom used to say, ‘Il mundo e piccolo piccolo.’ The world is very thin. In other words, our existence is precarious.”

Over the years, Love has created landscape-related forms: currently, she’s thinking of pursuing that 3-D space, rather than focusing on the surface. “I am interested not in making recognizable landscapes, but using the idea of landscape as a framework to drape absurd magical forms. I live in the wild desert hills and I am inspired by their magic.”

As viewers are inspired by the magic inherent in her work.

• Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist