Emily Kapitza is a senior graduating from Stockton with a Visual Arts BFA with a concentration in Studio Art and her focus being painting. She is an abstract artist based in Absecon, New Jersey and has a small business, Mimi’s Masterpieces LLC, where she takes commissions and sells her paintings. She hopes to one day open a collaborative studio center for artists and creative people to use and to have a studio space where they can also work alongside other artists.
Instagram:
@mimis.masterpieces333
Resume:
Artist Statement:
Flow of The Mind, 2022-23
Thinned down oil paint on unstretched canvas and stretched canvas; acrylic on canvas
When I created my paintings, I no longer thought about the world around me and was transported to another universe. When choosing colors, I left it up to chance and chose what felt right in the moment. People often forget that color is not just simply a visual experience but also an emotional one. Mixing my paints felt like making potions, except there were no measurements. Once my mixtures were done was where the real magic happened. Watching the paint flow from the cup onto the canvas and off while manipulating the canvas to create an unexpected combination of colors. Watching all the little bubbles and swirls form into each other is something you can’t unsee or replicate twice. Letting the paint flow and work its magic has been a meditative and cathartic experience.
I assembled the installation like I created paintings. I embraced chance and looked for the beautiful chaos and the color relationships that felt right in the moment; adding layers and taking some away, looking for significant and obvious color combinations and relationships while also matching up the splatter marks on the edges
The opacity of the solid color canvases also speak to that feeling of numbness. The stillness of color and the opacity, in contrast with the chaos of other paintings, depicts what feeling mentally numb while still feeling a range of emotions can look like.
Each painting has my mood and emotions poured and painted on to the surface, locked in place forever on the surface. Helen Frankelthaler, an abstract expressionist known best for her acrylic pour paints said it best, “One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronized with your head and your heart, and you have it…It looks as if it were born in a minute.”
View the installation as a whole, where the paintings “flow” into each other, but also get up close to see the complexities in the color relationships and the layering.
