Busacca Gallery

Blue Landscape, Oil Painting on Cotton Paper by Artist Ana Lopez Montes is part of a series of original works named Seaports. The painting is made with oil paint, graphite and spatula to render spontaneous forms of color. Ana Lopez Montes deconstructs simple subject matters concentrating on the materiality of painting. She layers color as in impasto painting technique, focuses on intuition and plays with an non predetermined structure. Ana Lopez-Montes has a BFA from School of Visual Arts in New York City. Extensive studio work in France and in México City has lead her work to concentrate in the modern theories of color especially in painting and in the printmaking technique, monotype. She recently exhibited her monotypes at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Merida, Yucatan, MACAY, Anthropology Museum of Xalapa, MAX and the Stamp Museum of Toluca in Mexico. Previously her work has been exhibited in New York City, Spain, France, U.K., Bulgary and Canada. She lives and works in Mexico City.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impasto

Impastoed paint serves several purposes. First, it makes the light reflect in a particular way, giving the artist additional control over the play of light on the painting. Second, it can add expressiveness to the painting, the viewer being able to notice the strength and speed applied by the artist. Third, impasto can push a painting into a three dimensional sculptural rendering. The first objective was originally sought by masters such as Rembrandt and Titian, to represent folds in clothes or jewels: it was then juxtaposed with more delicate painting. Much later, the French impressionists created entire canvases of rich impasto textures. Vincent van Gogh used it frequently for aesthetics and expression. Abstract expressionists such as Hans Hofmann and Willem De Kooning also made extensive use of it, motivated in part by a desire to create paintings which dramatically record the "action" of painting itself. Still more recently, Frank Auerbach has used such heavy impasto that some of his paintings become almost three-dimensional.

Because impasto gives texture to the painting, it can be opposed to flat, smooth, or blending techniques.