The show begins with the work of Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle (1901-2002), who taught at Texas Woman’s University for over forty-four years. Her oil paintings and series of sketches, made from oil pastel on paper, demonstrate how she worked with the fundamentals of color, abstract form, and composition, inspired by the landscape. LaSelle studied with the abstract expressionist painter and teacher, Hans Hofmann, where she learned the “push and pull” effect, which develops a compositional tension that makes her abstract compositions of various geometric forms come alive. LaSelle’s sketches, in their different permutations, feel like a like a game in which she challenges herself and wins. Her paintings are deeper studies with agile brushstrokes and layered colors. In Climate of the Heart #7 (1956), LaSelle achieves the colors of the sky and sand. Light blues, dappled with lavenders, contrast with faint peaches. This painting glows with its own quiet, studied power, and this power remains—even grows—when I return to it after seeing its successors.

Meanwhile, the atmospheric, peaceful qualities in Houston artist Marcelyn McNeil’s Ramp Paintings reference both Helen Frankenthaler and the California Light and Space Movement. McNeil has an architectural background, as indicated by the shape of her canvases. These tall, vertical paintings are not hung but instead lean against the wall, like John McCracken’s Planks. The edges of McNeil’s paintings merge closer together towards the top, like the lines of a ramp receding into the distance. According to Weaver, a ramp is used in architecture to slow a person down, and these paintings should be installed on the ground, which wasn’t feasible for the exhibition. Using a soak and stain effect, McNeil’s serene, luminous and cloud-like color fields result from the paint colors bleeding through the canvas.

Dorothy Hood (1918-2000) created paintings that seem almost emptied of the hand, formed as if by magic or a big bang. Hood spent nearly twenty years in Mexico amidst a formative circle of artists including Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, before returning to Houston where she taught painting at the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts. She worked on a heroic scale, with large expanses of color fields juxtaposed with black zones and strange, intermittent areas where the painting is patterned, echoing natural forms like canyons and oceans. Some of these patterns are made with the surrealist technique of decalcomania, which involves the transfer of paint pressed between two surfaces. The exhibition’s accompanying catalog cites Hood’s aesthetic philosophy:

In times of the incredulous or agnostic, the ultimate symbol of art is the symbol of the immeasurable, the Void. The Void is the end place of all correspondence in the mind, wherein function multiple mirrors and switchbooks, revealers of their own invaluable truth on a level usually made inaccessible by dogma and delusion.^[2]

The philosophical ideals that drove Hood’s abstract practice confirm the complexity behind her images. Her art looks like she saw the images in her mind first and then used her painting techniques to bring them into existence. Some areas of her paintings feel like outer space, not just through color but composition, as if gravity doesn’t apply. The effect is slightly unsettling. They contain just enough natural allusions to displace my perspective and make me wonder if I am looking up or down.

Yet with San Antonio artist Liz Ward’s painted and collaged pieces, such as Ghosts of the Old Mississippi: Dismal Swamp/Northern Lights (2015), the allusion is clearly to a river. Ward, who teaches environmental science in addition to art, questions the effect of humanity on the planet. Her approach is poetic and dreamlike, with watercolors simulating water flowing through a toile-patterned paper background. Like other artists in this show, Ward uses her titles to hint at a story, serving as a verbal framing device, prompting the viewer to consider the non-narrative forms. Constance Lowe (also in San Antonio) also focuses on humanity’s intervention on the natural landscape, incorporating satellite images of Midwestern farmland into her collages. Simply titled Garden City #2 (2013), Lowe’s collage adheres to shape and form, and her colors stay within the lines, reinforcing her reference to these geometric forms imposed upon the natural landscape. Houston artist Pat Colville’s paintings feature geometric, colored forms inspired by Japanese architecture and landscape design.

A series of seven glazed ceramic sculptures by Houston artist Sharon Engelstein, arranged in a row on a long pedestal in the middle of one gallery, feels like walking up on a party. A tall white glazed leg or phallic-like form stands next to a curvy lumpy form with gold chunks inside. Some are glazed with iridescence, while others are matte, but they are all playful, surprising and humorous without being flippant. Each one is a completely different exercise in ceramic as a medium; you feel its pliability, its gravity, even its slipperiness, yet every one of them possesses a curious allure. Among the heady seriousness of some abstract art, Engelstein’s forms are a relief to encounter, like finding a funny person in the room.

Catherine Lee’s grid painting, Chocolate Cadmium (Quanta #21) (2012) needs to be examined for the way the paint is laid down on the canvas, applied and packed into tiny squares, brush after careful brush, to form a grid in the studied, thoughtful manner of Agnes Martin. Yet Lee, who works in Wimberley, brings her own references to her palette, working with the principles of quantum physics in mind, recording the energy in a deep red, the light and intensity of the pigment varying within each square. The meditative act of her painting seems like an athlete being in the zone, moving to a powerful, internal rhythm. Houston artist Susie Rosmarin also works with grids, yet her paintings appear almost machine made, with little evidence of a brush. Upon closer examination, Rosmarin’s elaborate, intense grids result from a complex method of painting and taping.

Dana Frankfort’s paintings are gestural and improvisational, the brushstrokes visible, streaking across the canvas, with layered colors and material. Frankfort, also in Houston, uses words and poetry as starting points for her manipulation of paint, while paintings by another Houston artist, Terrell James, are their own fields built from color, line and space. James’ lively brushstrokes—their squiggly unevenness and texture—form a large part of the paintings themselves. Working on multiple paintings at once, James arrives at her compositions through an intuitive process that feels like a messy, painterly form of chess. She believes “there is always a ‘second painting…in which the viewer ‘participates,’ bringing their own experiences.”^[3]

With no words but the title, and no stories inside the art, we arrive with our own baggage and this, along with what we learn from the art, gets reflected back at us. For example, in a series of drawings, Lawrence records the data from her phone conversations with a friend over months. The result looks completely abstract, but learning the meaning behind these forms causes reflection about the time we put into our own relationships.

Inspired by the spiritual spaces that she has traveled to in Egypt, Japan and India, Margo Sawyer, who lives and works in Austin and Elgin, uses glass as a medium to reflect and hold color and light. In Reflect (1997-2020) Sawyer uses the same components to make different installations based on the space she’s working with, and fits them together like a puzzle. Her installation offers a three-dimensional demonstration of abstraction’s building blocks, these many shapes, colors, lines and forms assembled together in an enticingly beautiful floorscape. Though Sawyer intends for these spaces to be contemplative, standing at the plexi barrier, gazing into the small room filled with her stacked glass tiles with gold centers, sparkly glittered acrylic tiles, hot pink painted rectangular trays and the millions of silver Pachinko balls, feels like shopping without the shopping. It activates the same pleasure center, but in this case looking becomes a form of consumption (though sustainable and renewable). Like James’ paintings, which offer a tactile, sensory delight of color and painting, Sawyer’s version of abstraction feels accessible—not all imposing—and generous through its beauty. The stereotype of abstraction is that it is a painter’s style, as in the cases of James and Lee, but Engelstein’s ceramic sculptures and Sawyer’s installation offer alternative versions.

The newest work in the show is by Liz Trosper, Lorraine Tady, Sara Cardona (all living and working in Dallas) and Lawrence (who lives and works in Denton), all from 2019. By the time I reached these pieces I was re-familiarized with the concerns of abstract art and the various ways artists work with these tenets. So I was prepared to consider Trosper’s gigantic canvas, made with a digital scanner, and Cardona’s “collage organisms,” digitally printed on aluminum, in which the artist’s hand seemed not just invisible but altogether gone. According to Weaver, these artists are asking, in our virtual and screen-filled worlds, “where is the gesture?” Viewing these images, which look digital and machine generated, I felt strangely nostalgic for the delicate touch of LaSelle’s brush. The tactile lines of paint, which looks as if they’ve been squeezed from a tube, in Trosper’s records (in 7 units) (2018) return a sense of touch to her art, but it’s safely distanced from the viewer behind glass. Like Linnea Glatt’s black and white wall sculptures which are geometric in form but have curious carpet-like surfaces, they beg to be touched. So much of craving to feel and touch results from the varied intense processes behind this art’s creation—scraping, sanding, pouring, sculpting, arranging, taping, painting, scanning. It’s a reminder of how much the body is present in so much of this work, and how the language of abstraction speaks not just to our minds but to our senses, expressing meanings not definable by words.