Maisy Timney
Degree: Fine Art
University: Bath Spa
Graduation Year: 2024
New Blood Art Commentary
Maisy Timney’s paintings are animated by an intuitive energy, where layered marks and painterly gestures create a sense of rhythm and evolving depth. Her work feels grounded in the physicality of paint, celebrating its ability to capture movement and emotion. There’s an immediacy to her compositions—a raw, instinctive quality that draws the viewer into her process. Timney’s practice engages with the traditions of gestural abstraction, but her approach feels personal and exploratory, allowing the act of painting itself to guide the outcome. Each canvas offers a vibrant, open-ended dialogue between control and spontaneity.
Artist Statement
Through a formalist approach to abstract painting, I explore motif, form, and color. My work revolves around investigating the interplay between pictorial depth and flatness in a two-dimensional space. I am investigating the transition of forms into images through an exploration of the boundary between the materiality of paint and visual representation on a canvas. My compositions feature elements of both graphic flatness and painterly gesture. Maintaining an intentional inconsistency in the treatment of paint, my work explores the tension between the confines of the painted surface and the pictorial image. My paintings are contextualized through the language of abstraction and figuration, a hybrid exploration between digital and painterly aesthetics. I am significantly influenced by the art of gestural female painters, whose work has strongly shaped both my painting technique and the themes explored within my own work. I want the paintings to offer a sense of unpredictability combined with deliberate, premeditated paint application, emphasizing the process-based nature of painting. I create repeated forms and motifs through my works, employing techniques that highlight the significance of repetition and a close consideration of how the paint is applied. Laboriously made, the abstract paintings combine slow gestural marks alongside precise brushwork. I convey a sense of movement among the forms of the painting while exploring relationships between color and shape and how they create space and depth between them.
