"What we talk about when we talk about color", a show of works by Elizabeth Cody on view at The Pleiades Gallery, 547 W.27th Street, New York from April 18 through May 13, 2023.

In this show Elizabeth explores her relationship to palette, form, and composition challenging herself and the viewer to examine the emotional impact of color. An action artist with bold, confident strokes, her work on view seeks to elicit immediate connection while rewarding thoughtful attention over time.

Beth’s colorist approach has been shaped and advanced by the style of great artists and teachers she admires Including Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Joan Brown. Their example urged her to be constantly aware of the emotional content of her color choice, of the tensions created by certain color juxtapositions and the way formal composition can become fluid depending on the color choices. She’s tried to make those core characteristics of her practice.

In this show, all of the works are oil and acrylic paintings on paper and Mylar. This particular series was originally inspired by paintings of Bill Scott, a teacher and mentor. Scott is a contemporary abstract painter based in Philadelphia whose abstracted landscapes echo flora and fauna using lines and blocks of intense color. From this exploratory starting pad the series evolved to create works that honored its colorist roots by using formal compositional elements - circles, triangles, squares - that are surrounded and transformed by strong, aggressive brushwork featuring a stark, bright, pure palette. The resulting works are intended to challenge and please, to demand attention and reward contemplation, to hold interest and earn a place in your life.

A small series of works on paper in this show explore the impact that the absence and presence of color have on our emotional engagement with an image. Is a flower without color a flower? Can it be more than a flower? Does it become something else? Can a flower in full color be anything other than a flower? How is our interaction with an image expanded, limited or enhanced by color? These related pieces pose these and other questions for the viewer. Taken together the paintings and drawings in this show ask us to consider what we think about when we think about color.

I speak with paint. My most recent interest is sound, rhythm and words as the subject for a painting. My art includes work painted while repeatedly listening to certain songs. The songs all were chosen for their poetic lyrics, sound, and rhythm and because parts of the lyrics have stayed with me in some cases as far back as grade school. A tune that gets stuck in your head is called an earwig or earworm and thus is the series title. I am an artist who draws and paints but that does not tell the whole story. I am a writer of prose and poetry and I am beginning to incorporate this into my visual art.

(Elizabeth Cody)