Stacey Warnix’s Millefiori Collection: Referencing Italian for a thousand flowers, Millefiori embraces the artist’s love of flowers and travel. Gestural marks and brushstrokes combine to form deconstructed, abstract landscapes that resemble loosely splayed flowers. The artist builds dozens of layers of varying translucency to yield delicate, ethereal tonal effects over raw textile.
Structurally, the artist renders intentionally vague compositions that are loosely inspired from hazy, fleeting memories of places and moments experienced during extensive international travels. By limiting mark-making to imprecise, free-flowing gestural movements, the lack of representational context conveys a sense of ambiguity and universality that feels both familiar and imagined, like a bewildering daydream.
About the artist’s process:
All paintings include dozens of exceptionally thin hand-mixed layers applied over raw textile and include elements of collage that set and cure within wet paint layers. The artist has developed proprietary methods that exploit the molecular resiliency of modern acrylic-based paint technologies while mimicking the delicate aesthetics of pastel and watercolor applications, eliminating the inherent lightfastness and sealing challenges associated with
such media.
As a gestural artist, the artist approaches her creative process with fluidity and flexibility. She starts each painting with little more than a loosely defined concept or color scheme, laying down base layers with sweeping strokes and gravitational manipulations, allowing happenstance to shape the initial composition. Interspersing pigments and collage of varying translucency over raw, nubby textile grounds results in tonal and textural variations that convey gritty visual complexity and texture up close, but amalgamate into ethereal obscurity when viewed from greater distance.
Embracing the vague process, the artist incorporates markings that are emotional and often evocative of natural forms – like the wavy undulations of a flower petal or a weather-worn branch, or the silhouettes of deconstructed landscapes. She works in abundant layers, often numbering into the dozens for a single artwork, relying on artistic intuition to determine when an artwork is complete.
