There are painters of pictures and there are painters of paintings. Not all pictures are paintings and not all paintings are pictures.  Common thinking might describe pictures as representational – in other words they re-present, as in present again, something already present – boats in the harbour, a sunset, a dead tree and so on. But not all paintings are equal. Sometimes a painting will do more than represent the world as we know it. Sometimes, and at its best, painting will search for new ways to see the world and thereby increase the scope of our understanding of the world. Good painting makes new things visible. This is especially true of what is often called abstract painting or non-representational painting.

Most good abstract painting begins with the premise that the outcome is uncertain and the process of making is a process of discovery and is quite distinct from manufacture or production. So the artist begins to navigate with his or her self through a labyrinth of possibilities, cherishing one thing and discarding another. Through this process something previously unknown or unseen is born into the world. This idea of painting has its technical origins in Monet and Cezanne and its philosophical roots in Malevich, Mondrian and later the abstract expressionists of 1950’s New York, Rothko, Kline et al.

Claire Lichtenstein is a painter of this type. By sustaining a complex dialogue with her material, the paint, she allows various sensuous entities to emerge on her canvasses speaking to and of biomorphic fields, of tissue and serum, of fold and crease, of crust and skin.