Circular Souls, 2020

Louise Blyton  

Australian abstract artist Louise Blyton employs precise, Reductivist methods to create lucid, harmonious, multidimensional artworks that embody the marriage of color, texture, and form.

Blyton marries method with meaning by handcrafting each of her works using precise, Reductivist techniques. Her finished works—shaped, minimal canvases designed to hang on a wall—occupy a liminal zone between traditional painting and sculpture.
Their unpretentious simplicity belies the considerable care, time, and problem solving that goes into their construction.

Blyton first builds her forms from balsa wood, then covers the wood with linen glue and carefully applies the hand-cut linen in the simplest possible way, so that folds and seams are all but eliminated. Seeking the most straightforward possible expression of colour, she carefully applies acrylic paint into the untreated linen surface, building up to 20 coats of very thin matt paint to achieve the same saturation as her previous works with raw acrylic pigments.

The patience and focus that are essential to her technique emanate in the quietude of the finished works.

Precision and focus are a big part of what inspires Blyton, as is evident in the care she takes at every stage of her process. It is not only physical method that matters to her, however. She is also motivated by the meditative aspect of the search for natural beauty.
Throughout the creation of a work, the relationship between light, shadow and colour evolves, and the character of the form changes as the texture of the raw linen negotiates with that of the painted areas. This exercise is as much about the the coming together of formal elements as it is about the transcendence of raw materials into an aesthetic object capable of projecting meaning into a physical space.

Blyton has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.
Recent exhibitions include Little Daydreams (petites reveries), at Factory 49 Paris, France; All the Birds are Singing, at Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, USA; Drawing Now Paris, at the  Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at MECA, Portland, ME, USA; and ICONS W\ 13, KNO (Kyiv Non Objective), at Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, Kiev, Ukraine.