XANDA MCCAGG

Artist Statement

My artistic practice is an ongoing search for the inherent humanity expressed through art and its metaphorical potential. Through abstraction I explore causality, relationships, and the iconographical qualities of painting. Working with oil, graphite, and collage, ranging in size from very small to large, I create works around the idea of traces, marks and compositions that capture the essence of experience.

Moving into abstraction was a subtractive process. From my roots in the classical figurative tradition, I became interested in how much visual information is necessary to convey my ideas. I began to use white paint to mask out areas of my figure drawings that I considered secondary. White has now become a central component of my paintings, in tandem with the vibrant colors that occupy the same surface. Sometimes white serves as a background, sometimes it overlays color as a free-floating element, or jostles with those elements for primacy, reading as both a negative space and an active element. I liken this to the way the absence of a thing or a person can be as palpable as their presence.