Pencil and paint stick on paper. Unframed.
This piece is one of a group of works on paper made with paint sticks and pencil on paper that has been primed with gesso.
The works on paper, although not specifically made to be the preparatory drawings for a larger painting, do inform her larger bodies of work.
In this work McCagg is making color shapes and articulating different points and ideas with the line.
McCagg's work is informed and influenced by formal elements such as line and space, which provide an underlying aesthetic vocabulary for her compositions.
Xanda McCagg is an American abstract artist who lives and works in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.
A classically trained painter, she has evolved into a style that abandons figuration in search of evoking the human essence.
McCagg creates her abstract compositions using a mixture of oil, graphite and collage. Although she began her practice as a figurative painter, she has abandoned the figure in search of more intimate portrayals of the human essence. Nonetheless, her work is informed and influenced by formal elements such as line and space, which provide an underlying aesthetic vocabulary for her compositions.
Integral to her process is an exploration of the small and large ways relationships can “shift.” Through the expressive layering of thin and impasto color, and delicate and rough-hewn lines, McCagg works to articulate these often-subtle evolutions. Rather than planning precisely where her composition will lead her, she intuits throughout her process the minimum amount needed to manifest the essence of what she calls “the fine line between perception and imagination of these relationships.”
