Louise P. Sloane

Interviews by Brainard Carey

Louise P. Sloane (b. 1952) has been active as an abstract painter since 1974, infusing her works with personal text that motivates her own experimentation. The visual language of her paintings continues the legacy of reductive and minimalist ideologies, while celebrating color and the human inclination towards mark making. Sloane’s detail-oriented works are typically divided into rectangles or squares. The quadrangle has become a repetitive motif, often centrally featured within the context of a grid. In contrast with her iterative geometries, it is important to Sloane that the works present themselves as human made objects. Thick paint constructs repetitive handmade patterns, the physical motion of her brush strokes revealing the humanity of her practice. The surface holds Sloane’s signature extrusions. Painstakingly written and overwritten, Sloane’s inscribed text is a form of private meditation. Turned into a relief, and abstracted through color blocking, the text is interpreted through its physicality, not its meaning. Contrasting color choices intensify the dimensionality of the surface texture. Sloane uses color straight-up, without mixing. Blending takes place optically, as one color reacts to the other, red against green, or blue against yellow. The elements of mark-making, color, and geometry compete for the viewer’s focus, keeping the eyes and mind in constant motion, unifying her interests in the form of the square. Sloane’s work has been featured in numerous institutional collections, including the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Cornell Museum of Art and History. Sloane’s works are in the permanent collections of the Heckscher Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Nassau County Museum of Art, Yeshiva University Museum, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (the Sidney and Francis Lewis Collection). Louise P. Sloane Hot House, 2013 Signed, titled, and dated on the verso Acrylic paint and paste on aluminum panel 56 x 48 inches. Louise P. Sloane Patrician Blue, 1999 Signed, titled, and dated on the verso Acrylic paint and paste on panel 32 x 32 inches. Cool Tones, 1976, Signed, titled, and dated on the verso, Oil, paraffin, and pure pigment powders on, canvas, 54 x 48 inches.