Pippin Studio: Spontaneous Discoveries In Color

(Published November 2014) When walking around the bright and airy studio where Aleta Pippin creates her lively abstract paintings, she often stops mid-sentence to notice a spot of vibrant red, subtle blue or energetic yellow on one of her canvases.

“I just love the color in that piece,” she suddenly interjects.

It’s not hard to detect that Pippin is a colorist; she’s quick to tell you how much she loves color and this fascination is easily apparent in her work. While her artistic process is spontaneous, her work is created without premeditation. Over time, she has noticed continuous changes in her style, technique, and of course, use of color. She thrives on artistic experimentation, which keeps her work fresh and exciting to collectors and to herslef as a creator. However, she also spends time reevaluating where she’s been and how her career is artistically progressing, while also maintaining a consistent style that is true to her body of work.

 

“This time of year, I start to assess what I’m doing and why I’m doing it,” explains Pippin. “I ask myself if I’m going in a direction I want to continue.”

In the past several years, Pippin has been subconsciously directed towards a “softer” color palette as she calls it, shifting away from the saturated primary colors that typically permeated her canvases. While she still uses bold red, yellow and blue hues, she has started mixing softer, muted colors on the canvas that give her work a more complex feel.

“Besides being experimental, what I offer is color,” says Pippin. “That’s always the feedback I get from collectors and people who view my work – that they love the color. So that’s where I am right now, I’m working in more color blends than staying with primaries.”

Since Pippin allows her present emotions to dictate her painting, she can’t pinpoint the exact moment when shifts in her work began to happen. She guessed the color palette altered when she started working on smaller panels in acrylic, but can’t assign the beginning of the transition to any single piece or moment of revelation.

“I’ve created anywhere from 850 to 900 (from 2004 through 2014) at this point in time,” says Pippin. “When and why do they start changing? It’s interesting even to me.”

As you make your way through the organized chaos of Pippin’s studio, stepping over drying canvases and carefully avoiding clusters of paint bottles (“I spend a lot of time on the floor,” Pippin confesses), she will stop momentarily to explain the history and “past lives” of some of her paintings, even comparing an image of the original work with the current one. One of these reworked pieces is “Momentum,” which has existed under three different titles.

Now a lively abstraction of muted purples, bleeding blues and bursts of yellow, it was first an impressionistic nude titled “Compelling.” After deciding that a nude form was not harmonious with her current aesthetic at Pippin Contemporary, she decided to rework the piece to stay true to her abstract style. Then came the painting’s second life as a nonrepresentational “Sunrise, Sunset,” and now the layers of renewed color finally hang at the gallery as “Momentum.”

Inspiring ideas, subconscious artistic decisions, and quick movements of color on canvas – it all happens in Pippin’s sacred studio space. The Santa Fe artist creates an energy with her work that she can feel while she paints, the same energy that her collectors take with them when they buy one of her paintings.

“I can always feel a shift when I come into the studio. I don’t know what it is, but there are positive things happening here and it feels good.”