When I moved to the UK in 1998, I began working with acrylic. It seemed the perfect medium to mirror what my American eyes were seeing -- the visible presence of history in the landscape. Remnants of London’s Roman wall stood cheek by jowl with Norman Foster’s rising “gherkin.” In coastal Cornwall, where I had a residency, Neolithic standing stones and abandoned 19th century tin mines punctuated the countryside. Acrylic’s fast drying time and impermeability were well-suited to making many-layered paintings, which I then sanded down to reveal traces of what lay beneath. While my current work diverges from that I made during seven years in Europe, creating a painted surface with a history-- to evoke the passage of time -- still engages me.

Line emerged as an independent element in my Valparaiso paintings -- small portable works on paper begun during a 2005 residency at Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain. In them, I overlaid patterned or textured fields of gouache and acrylic color with angular crayon or pencil lines. Subsequent awkward attempts at making controlled acrylic lines with a variety of tools --including the stubby remains of oil-painting brushes – were unsatisfactory. When in 2007, I recalled Philadelphia painter, Edna Andrade, telling me years ago, that she had used a ruling pen -- an adjustable calliper which is dipped in paint -- to make the lines in her elegant, precisely-calibrated, geometrical paintings, I realized that I had inherited more than the use of the ruling pen from her. Edna died in 2008.

My Diagonal Thinking series consists of square works that occupy a middle ground between painting and drawing. In these pieces, a delicate linear geometry is alternately overlaid with, or superimposed upon, subtly translucent layers of acrylic color. Comprised of multiple layers of paint -- brushed, spattered, smeared or lined with a ruling pen -- and characterized by sensitivity to surface and expressive mark-making, the series explores the structure of the square.

Line and the ruling pen also take center stage in my current Delineation series. In some of the works on paper, accumulations of painted lines coalesce into larger shapes, which are themselves transformed by underlying layers of pigment. In others, a delicate curvilinear grid floats atop a painterly ground. The Delineation panels are built up over time with thick swaths, splotches and drips of candy-colored acrylic paint. When they are subsequently sanded down, many layers coalesce into a seamless seductive surface -- a visual representation of a present moment shaped by prior experience.

Anne Krinsky