"Sgraffito" by Paula Clendenin

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"Sgraffito" from the Vanitas Series by Paula Clendenin is paint and coal dust on panel, bringing the rich coal-mining history … Read more "Sgraffito" from the Vanitas Series by Paula Clendenin is paint and coal dust on panel, bringing the rich coal-mining history of the West Virginia landscape to the work. The work is an abstract in neutral colors, making it perfect of nearly any decor style.
Drawing inspiration from 16th- and 17th-century Flemish still life painting, Paula Clendenin’s Vanitas Series revisits the enduring theme of life’s impermanence. Much like the vanitas tradition, which revealed beauty and decay in the same image, these works meditate on vulnerability while simultaneously delighting in surface play and material richness.
In this body of work, Clendenin incorporates sgraffito, inscribing directly into wet paint to create layered textures and lines that echo both presence and absence. For the first time, she introduces additive materials tied to her West Virginia roots—coal, with its dense blackness, and rusted steel, with its weathered patina—embedding the physical landscape of Appalachia into the very surface of her paintings.
Of this period, Clendenin reflects on the sense of artistic clarity she has achieved. As Jenine Culligan, Senior Curator at the Huntington Museum of Art, observes: “Paula Clendenin believes this is an important and profound time in her life. She feels as though she is completely ‘in-situ,’ consistently able to find her ‘zone of least resistance’ and access that creative space between the conscious and unconscious—the place where stuff is hidden.”
Through these works, Clendenin offers a meditation on fragility, transformation, and the raw materials of both memory and place.
Signed verso.

Exhibition:
2005-6: Curator’s Choice: Paula Clendenin. The Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia
2007: Annex Gallery, Charleston, West Virginia See less