Allison Renshaw’s vibrant paintings lead one into an organic world of color. For her 2007 exhibition at QCA, Fragments, she combined images from fashion magazines and advertising graphics with her cosmic paintings. Of this work, Renshaw said, “These found fragments are turned into something new, something inexplicable. Lines between the organic and the man-made become blurred and a larger narrative is evoked through a banal fragment.” Her work transcends the everyday, giving the viewer a sense of the world but in a bigger and better way.
I believe in the sensual touch of the human hand. I want to reach the viewer through modulation of space and light. I make things real without having them be imitative. Accidents are the key to every decision. Life is not a theory. Life is lived. Painting is not a theory. Painting is an act of living. I have sought in my work to find the “truth of things” beyond the “appearance of things.” Through action and experience, I paint a ritualistic reordering of reality. My ideas are grounded in emotion, and through each physical stroke they become realized in the matter. I approach my work intuitively, where by I enter into the complexity of conscious and unconscious forces. When my work progresses well, I slip into an exhilarating and terrifying relationship to the world. Paint is the vehicle, which carries me to this unique state of living.
— Allison Renshaw
“Her style of fragmentation in this new work takes one back to James Rosenquist’s croppings and recombinations of images, which began with such paintings as “F-111.”… They build on what she has done already, adding traces of culture to those from nature.”
— Robert L. Pincus, San Diego Union Tribune, June 14, 2007, p. 30.
