Shane Guffogg: Color Part 6
Women Artists Finding a Voice Through Color and Abstraction
(Conversation between Victoria Chapman and Los Angeles based artist, Shane Guffogg continues)

Women painters of the abstract expressionist movement embraced the zeitgeist of their male peers, while managing to add to this new visual language, creating sensual artworks. Their ideas on life and nature and how it could be expressed with color, space, and line were guided by their intuition. They produced some of the most sublime and beautiful abstract paintings ever.

The fight for equality was ongoing, as was the dialogue surrounding issues caused by World War II, but for the first time, women artists began to transmit their personal messages. These sometimes featured an absence of color and lines, with portions of blank canvas being equally as important as the saturated areas. Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011) said, “Color without space is meaningless.” The women of this period had much to unravel about painting’s history so that they, too, could construct their own meaningful interpretation of art’s future.