This month, two of the artists at 57 Underground are showing works that are inspired by the human body. Yi-li Chin Ward is showing loosely representational works depicting sprites that live and dance among the clouds. Karen Duckles is showing abstract paintings also inspired by movements of the body through space.

Karen Duckles

For this exhibition, Karen Duckles has focused on movements make by the human body. Her abstracted images are about the fee of particular movements, such as bending, twisting, or reaching. She represents these movements by applying the paint in a gestural manner, often using her hands directly on the canvas, which imparts a sensuous quality of touch to the work. The flow and physicality of the paint meld with the physicality of the imagery and evoke the feeling of movement.

www.karenduckles.com

Yi-li Chin Ward

I have been drawing nudes regularly for the past 30 years (with flowers, landscapes, portraits, and other experiments). I think of all the subjects, nudes are the closest to defining me, the easiest to disappear into, the freest and the most beautiful of the graphic things I do.

For this show I chose to start from past examples, and drawings, and from memory, and then tried to combine the most interesting, hopeful postures and gestures into larger groups and conversations. The result is not really close to what I started with, because at every step, the drawings changed, the lines changed, and the gestures became more focused. I hope you understand, that the groups you see here could have kept evolving, but are frozen in these particular sets of line, color and gesture, simply because I had to stop the process somewhere, and hang the show.

People naturally have a lifetime of deep feelings invested each in their own human form. It is often not easy to consider ones "own self" naked and vulnerable like art models learn to do. I want depict that kind of human emotion: seen and unseen, with the colors and shapes that I use. I pick the colors to portray the emotions. The paintings are part artist's model, and part me. The feeling of being human and vulnerable, or angry, or just open to new experience.

I like to pierce what's on the surface, in order to get to deeper feelings beneath. I create these feelings within myself, and then attempt to communicate them graphically to other people.

www.yilichinward.com