Something Good is About to Happen

Linda McCane Gritta’s artistic epiphany was swift and intense — like a window flung open to reveal an unsuspected landscape. It also came early, when she was only seven. And the effects linger today, in what she describes as an ongoing “dance and dialogue” between herself and her painting.

As a little girl, Gritta visited the Art Institute in her native Chicago and found herself standing in front of Seurat’s pointillist masterwork Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Until that moment, faced with a real painting, “I had never realized that a person — one person — took a paintbrush and by putting little blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface created an entire scene,” Gritta recalls. “That basically blew my little mind and stayed with me as a latent force until much later, when it finally surfaced and ushered me into my life as a painter.”

Working in oils, acrylics, or mixed media, Gritta has created a growing body of work that shifts fluidly between pure abstraction and more traditional figurative work, imbued with an inner tranquility born of a carefully chosen palette and brushwork. “I find when I rely on the logic of colors in addition to the logic of the brain, the painting gets interesting,” Gritta says.

It took some time, though, before Gritta’s Seurat moment blossomed into a full career; she had no family tradition in the arts and first obtained a degree in Education for the Deaf. But by her mid-thirties, her interest in the creative life grew strong enough to lead to a Bachelors in Fine Arts, which introduced her to the basics of drawing and painting. Artistic appetite fully whetted, she progressed to the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, famous for its intensive courses and its encouragement of self-directed work rather than academic rigor. “I gained a deep understanding of the technical and historical aspects of painting, and also developed a very independent approach to my own creative path,” says Gritta, although she admits to “crushes on dead artists” like Cèzanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse from the 19th century and Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell in the 20th.

The list is a neat summation of her own oeuvre, encompassing as it does the hallmarks of those transitional years leading to pure abstraction. “What I adore about these artists is their willingness to search beyond the subject, their ability to say things with color in new and unexpected ways, their devotion to the process rather than to the making of ‘pretty pictures,’” she says.

Her abstract work is most opposed to that “tyranny of the safe and pretty,” as Gritta calls it. “It’s sometimes tempting to hang on to my initial idea too long,” she says. “My best paintings are ones that I approach as an adventure and with a good dose of audacity. That moment when I stand completely undone in front of a painting and let go of a tight insistent grip on the brush is the moment that I know something good is about to happen.” The resulting work is enigmatic in swirls and blocks of color, on the edge of taking more solid form but spurring the imagination as to what that form might be. “I think that what has drawn me more and more towards abstraction is that the viewer isn’t given a chance to glance at the painting and say, ‘Oh what a nice painting of … whatever’. Without a recognizable object to comment on, I’m giving my viewer a chance to play.”

Color takes an even more central role in Gritta’s figurative work — the deep, soothing glow of blue water in which figures serenely float. “I always loved water and am more and more fascinated by the figure,” she says. “They are both symbols of life. There’s something so simple, primal, and iconic about both water and the body.” These aquatic creations are based on photographs, often of herself, and represent for her an intensely personal bond with her art. The paint, she says, “buoys me up, it sustains me, and has an indescribable power all its own.”

Considering her several best-in-show awards, her exhibitions in the Southeast and in New York, and her solo show planned for next year at UNCA, it’s clear that her childhood epiphany continues to bear fruit. “There is such little genuine looking in our lives now,” Gritta says. “I want the viewer to forget all the labels, and just look.”

For more information about Linda McCane Gritta, call 828-582-4436 or see the artist’s website at www.lindamccanegritta.com.