abigail wolf

Does painting with mud count? What about smushed up purple pokeberries and a brush of leaves?
How about a glowing ember at the end of a stick in the hot summer night, swirled through the air?
From my earliest memories, the world has been singing and twinkling alive with art. Color mixing can happen even with food.

I live and work in Bloomington IN with my husband and three children. I have been an artist all of my life.
I studied at: The Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., an artist's kibbutz in Israel, K'far Hanasi, Glen Echo Art School in Potomac, Maryland, Was...

Does painting with mud count? What about smushed up purple pokeberries and a brush of leaves?
How about a glowing ember at the end of a stick in the hot summer night, swirled through the air?
From my earliest memories, the world has been singing and twinkling alive with art. Color mixing can happen even with food.

I live and work in Bloomington IN with my husband and three children. I have been an artist all of my life.
I studied at: The Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., an artist's kibbutz in Israel, K'far Hanasi, Glen Echo Art School in Potomac, Maryland, Washington University School of Art in Saint Louis, Missouri, Lithography and Photography at Humboldt State University in California and I hold a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts with honors from Earlham College. I am well versed in the disciplines of Sculpture, Printmaking, Graphic Arts, Digital Media, Design, Art History and of course Painting. I have dabbled in just about any art form I could get my hands on.

I have been painting with only acrylics for the last 10 years. At first I painted murals at home, for friends and at the temple because I needed the size in order to express myself. When I moved off of walls, I found canvas prices prohibitive and was interested in reusing materials. That was the hubcap and broken skateboard deck phase. There were around 70 of those in all. Hubcaps are interesting because each one is already a work of art with no other purpose than decorative. Left by the wayside I found a free canvas.

I realized in working with those materials that the used "canvas" brought its own life to the work. The idea of the perfect within the imperfect fascinated me. I continued to explore this within the format of the photos of rust. The pictures were taken with no borders or edges so that only the life of the rust itself was the focus of the image. The beautiful, even magical, within the mundane. The landscape within.

The acrylic paintings on canvas began to focus on the microcosm of my own experience within the context of my ancestors and descendants. The images cover Biblical themes, Eastern European Jewish stories as well as the stories of my own family history. The spiritual and internal struggles are also represented. All of these paintings are quite large in size and were painted almost exclusively with my hands. Some of them en plein air. I am interested in the way that stories have shaped this reality. I try to tell many parts of each story simultaneously in one image.

Recently I decided to try my hand at oil painting. I found the experience to be very sensual and immediately began exploring the erotic. These newest paintings are much smaller than the old ones, yet I have tried to zero in on the most intense part of the picture. A sort of hyper-focus on deep stirrings. Many of these have to do with inner longing, and a striving for freedom with the confines of the everyday.