Flow

Since her earliest straightforward paintings of glorious upper torso studies, Candace Masters has taken her interests through an eventful series of images featuring bright, cheerful figuration featuring candy and baby toys. Later, she concentrated on stylized icons in a range of expressive robot figures, work which she continues to exhibit.

Now, in a shift to abstraction, she is making paintings where a preconceived idea of a representative image in a figure/ ground relationship is secondary to the act of delivering paint to canvas. In cascading variations of painted, striated surfaces that form her recent work, she is at first limning color vertically in strands of combed impasto, overlapping and twining like thick hair or yarn evolving into the paint on plaster, forming the balance of her Flow paintings displayed at Art Sphere. There is a sense of resolute reinforcement with the spirited abstractions to distance herself from her previous body of work. With an inspired departure from paintings of breasts and boxy metal robots, Masters has taken on an even more personal examination of process in a transition from the popular to the particular. Her present exhibition shows her determination to move into uncertain outcomes veiled in raw possibility.

The exhibit continues through July 6.