The alchemy of abstraction

Shelley Horton-Trippe

Abstract Expressionism may be oblique to the viewer beyond the relationships of color, line, and form. But in the works of Santa Fe-based artist Shelley Horton-Trippe, concrete ideas inspire each canvas, along with moments and experiences upon which she has drawn to inform the work. The paintings in her exhibit opening Friday, Feb. 23, at Phil Space, are dynamic works she embarked upon not long after the last presidential election. The works deal with the inability to control the tumult that has engulfed the national scene but also reflects the artist’s ability to find, in the studio, a world of one’s own. “I really felt stymied and powerless,” she said. “I wanted to — at least in my studio — not feel so. So the work came out of that place of wanting to make some sort of alchemical change that might go out into the world.”

Horton-Trippe was born in Oklahoma, where she received a graduate degree after studying ceramics with Peter Voulkos at the University of Montana. She moved to Paris and then settled in Santa Fe in 1979. Horton-Trippe, who has representation at LewAllen Galleries, spent her early career as a video and performance artist. “In my youth, my work was far more figurative, and I was interested in the figure as it had to do with performance,” she said. “I got my graduate degree in video and performance when everything was black and white, reel to reel. The work that I was doing in my own private studio, oftentimes, was figurative and self-referential.” But she later leaned toward abstraction. “It allowed me to talk about things that I had no words for, and allowed me to talk about more philosophical things that I was dealing with in my mind and in my reading.”

Overall, there is a passionate intensity to the work and a spirited sense of a spontaneous, unconstrained artistic engagement. But throughout the process of creating the works, women’s empowerment was very much on the artist’s mind. “I read this great