Dana Oldfather begins each morning with philosophy and ends it with paint still on her hands. The Cleveland-based artist has spent two decades building a visual language that moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration — one driven not by calculation, …
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About the Artwork
Untitled is the focus and magnification of a thread that has run through Dana Oldfather’s work over the entirety of her career — the combination of two diametrical forces that create one complete, unnamed feeling.
The composition splits horizontally between two very different worlds. The upper half holds abstracted geometry: bright, colorful bursts of form. The lower half gives way to gestural black lines sprawling and spiraling in patterns that approach the veins of a leaf or the scales of a fish. Flat, black and white drawing set against vivid abstraction — each half made more potent by the presence of the other.
Untitled was designed digitally by Oldfather at her home in Cleveland in 2013 — while seven months pregnant — then brought to life in Brooklyn in collaboration with master printer Luther Davis, who worked to translate the composition into screenprint. The work explores ideas of contradiction made visible: black and white versus color, organic hand-drawn line versus geometric field shapes, opaque versus translucent layers. It was, the artist recalls, a beautiful late summer — a wonderful week in Brooklyn.
