My work is a response to the second-generation abstract expressionist painters, specifically Joan Mitchell, Paul Jenkins, and Cy Twombly. My newest body of work The Evolution of Movement is significantly influenced by the lyrical abstractionist’s sense of improvisation, gestural lines, and unrestrained painting style. The series reveals the significance of freedom in its overall creative process while simultaneously utilizing constraint to define order in its inherently unbridled form.
A majority of my creative practice contains non-figurative, improvised gesture by allowing the brush the freedom to mark the paper spontaneously without predetermined sketches or underlays. By embracing the use of richly pigmented watercolours and gesticulated motions, a truly abstract form is created. Adding to the unrestrained nature of my work is the use of a unique material, Yupo paper, a non-absorbent surface, enabling watercolour’s liquid properties to emerge.
Several of my works, i.e., Dancescape and Leisurely Sequences, are the result of the divergence from the free nature of abstract expressionist style. By working back into the pieces with defined line work, they transform from fluid, untouched shapes into forms now defined by black contours fixed to each curve and shape. The gaps once created naturally by free gesture are filled with tiny black dots and curvilinear marks that invade the form’s negative white space.
Overall, my work strives to represent the balance between freedom and order. There exists a basic tension between the two polar opposite concepts in not only nature and society but also in art. My work reveals a process driven by unimpeded expression in its initial painting style, while concurrently addressing the acts of limitation through delineated line work. While the claims of one often come at the expense of the other, my work conveys a basic equilibrium can exist between both freedom and order.
About esydora
Elise Noël Sydora was born in Houston, Texas in 1991. Sydora works predominantly in the medium of mixed media. Having lived in a variety of North American cities including Houston, St. John’s, Calgary, Berkeley, and Chicago, Sydora has been influenced to develop a unique means of expression. Being uprooted throughout her adolescence created a sense of imbalance, and she seeks to straddle the elements of order and disorder in her work. Sydora completed her BFA with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Sydora has been in a variety of group exhibitions throughout California and Chicago and has works in private collections throughout North America. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
