I first came to the work of Dona Nelson in the early 2000s. Her work follows in the tradition of American abstraction. I saw an artist however who was challenging the notions of austerity, and dare I say, taste. In her recent exhibition of paintings, created in the past year or so, Dona Nelson continues to fascinate me with her dedication to rigorous painting, her exploration of paintings as objects, and her jazz-like sense of art making.

        Each painting starts with a melody introduced by a large-scale drawing that is created by applying long ribbons of cheesecloth–soaked with acrylic medium–to the canvas, sometimes in an orderly design, sometimes in loose, quick, meandering gestures. This creates a linework of ridges, a topography, that guides watery and richly colored acrylic paint that is poured or splashed on the canvas, to create drips, pools, even swamps of color. The cheesecloth strips are removed, revealing, tagging back to the original drawing, the tune, and letting it emerge through the layers of improvisation she has superimposed upon it.

        To employ this jazz metaphor is not a random choice. The title of this exhibition was chosen by Dona Nelson as an allusion to pianist Gil Evans’s 1964 album, The Individualism of Gil Evans. The press release for the show references how “the music on the album is distinct from song to song, playing fast and light over many different motifs, timbres and emotional registers.” This is also an apt description of the work in the show, consisting of ten paintings, each unique in mood and melody, but united in a voice singularly Dona Nelson’s. Further, her selection of paintings and the careful and creative way in which they are displayed result in a concert in which the works complement each other— conveying both the elegant control with which she paints as well as a sense of whimsy with which the individual canvases sing.

        One painting that truly struck me was Monday. It was placed about 5 feet away from the wall and was elevated about a foot off the floor on a simple cool gray metal stand. It was further supported by two poles attached to the top of the painting and the wall, creating a sort of passage behind it. The front of the canvas is wild with line and color. If you go through the spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet—they are all there. The direction of the drips mostly seem to pull toward the center of the work. This is in tension with the line work, created by the aforementioned application and removal of ribbons of cheesecloth, which feels like it moves from the center outward. This movement and countermovement are balanced by the placidity of large, steady, blotches of color in terra cotta, spring green, mustard.

        As I spent time with Monday, an additional compositional element emerged from behind all the lines and pools of color. The center portion of the top third of the canvas has a murkiness, a greige shadow haunting the area. This becomes brighter and lighter in the middle of the painting. Then from behind that, a brilliant blue brings a levity that gives way to the creaminess of untouched canvas. This gesture, functioning almost as an underpainting, moves subtly and sublimely from dark to light—like a ray of light seeping from behind a cloud.

        The back of the painting is a single explosive note that has somehow been singled out from every other element in a tune. It is a giant splash of sky blue that cannot be hemmed in by a square line of unpainted canvas which the blue paint penetrates in splashes and splatters. It is the same blue that emerges so gracefully on the front of the painting, but here you see its force and machination.

        I have just spent three paragraphs describing only one of the paintings in this show. I feel this speaks to the complexity and nuance that each of the works contain. Each painting is as beautiful as it is challenging. Another example of this is River. I was told two things: that the artist made a choice during installation to hang this painting with the front of the canvas against the wall, and that the front is also quite astounding. The side with which we are presented brought to mind a question I have had before when encountering Dona Nelson’s paintings. How does she make it work? This painting is a cacophony of garish color. It is littered with little remnants of cheesecloth. It is at points muddy and dull and at others glittery, or even, as thick, shiny, and viscous as syrup. It is a mess. It is also beautiful and eloquent—worked to a point that it could contain no more, but at which every little gesture, not to mention the aggressive ones, all serve to seduce the viewer into her world, to listen to her music.

        Placed between the two paintings I have just described there is an interlude, Through the Day. This canvas is smaller than most in the show. Despite its yellow and orange burst-of-sunshine color, the painting is a little quieter. Throughout the canvas there are remnants of an imprecise grid upon which the composition hangs, or maybe, the grid is itself unraveling as we move our eyes from the upper left to the lower right. Looking at the painting, I thought about how the paint appears to be soaked through from behind—or seems to be stains that were to some degree washed away.

        As I moved through the show of her paintings, I found myself thinking a great deal about the process, imagining how they were made. Her work evokes in me a sense of empathetic creativity in which I can imagine what it would feel like to pour the paint onto the canvas. I found myself focusing on a single gesture the way I might listen for a single instrument in an ensemble. Then I found myself stepping back and seeing the bigger picture again. Then I took one more step back and saw how the paintings, some against the wall, a couple others floated into the room, were used architecturally to redefine the space they occupied. The canvases stopped being pictures, they moved beyond being surfaces—they are objects, sculptural in nature, pushing the limits of painting. Dona Nelson’s canvases filled the room the way a jazz ensemble might create sudden walls of sounds, fill little voids with a colorful trill, and inspire you to move through her music the way it inspired me.

Paul Moreno is an artist and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He organizes New York Queer Zine Fair and is the New York City Editor for the New Art Examiner.