‘It was always the line … I was completely compelled by the line from the get-go. It had more possibilities than form or shape or colour.’ - Elliott Puckette
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With an elegant simplicity that disguises her complex process, Elliott Puckette’s line navigates the surface with no intended structure. Her practice recalls the principles of Tachisme, the intuitive form of expression favoured by European painters in the 1940s and 50s.
Puckette’s paintings begin by preparing a wooden panel with a complex mixture of gesso and kaolin, which is then washed with colour; creating a delicate yet distinctive atmosphere upon which she can draw lines in space with white chalk. Using a razor blade, she then approaches the prepared picture surface with brisk, confident gestures, carving fluid pathways into the chalk with an instinctively light touch. The apparent ease of her mark making disguises the tension of her technique, because once a mark has been carved into the wooden board, it cannot be reversed. She then returns to the surface to deepen the furrows with cross-hatching, a labour-intensive process that inherently slows the line, subtracting it from the painting and delineating its negative space. Puckette’s drawings, which are ink on a specific type of Indian paper, share the fluidity of her paintings - with elegant, looping lines which feel both mediative and deliberate.
Elliott Puckette (born 1967 in Lexington, USA), received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 1989. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, the New York Public Library, New York, USA, the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, USA and the Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, USA. Puckette's first major monograph, with essays by Dr. David Anfam and Stephanie Cristello, was published by Kasmin Books in 2023.