Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of artist Diane Ayott. Ayott’s paintings and works on paper shift between balance and distortion, building on the foundations of color, pattern and repetition.

Ayott’s painted surfaces are worked in great detail; often using bottle caps, lids, and other quotidian objects as stamps in repetitive patterns. The works are an accrual of layers upon layers of marks upon marks, stamps upon stamps and patterns upon patterns. Beneath the quilt, the patchwork of marks, we find geometric shapes, the color developing strata and fields. The textured paint application and obsessive mark-making engage viewers viscerally and are further complimented by painterly considerations of color and form. Ayott hints at narrative, with the additional assistance of titles and bits of collage. In fact, a crucial aspect of Ayott’s studio practice is spent with a notebook and dictionary. Ayott says of her work, “From a distance, viewers may experience an overall color palette but once close to the work, small bits of distinct information reveal themselves.” The “small bits’: circles, dots, and ovals, resemble data but handwritten. Ayott’s lines and marks come into focus as we near and the penmanship takes on a precision. But Ayott’s precision avoids rigidity and is often a loosely applied geometry as evidenced in her method of patterning. There is a sense that the work is both a study and a doodle, serious and curious; a habit that enjoys fleshing out the meaning by writing it out over and over again. As viewers we read the results, the surface, the play of line, color and the again and again.

Diane Ayott is an associate professor in art education, painting and drawing at Montserrat College of Art. She had a one-person exhibition at the Danforth Museum of Art and exhibits in museums and galleries throughout the Northeast. She received her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and currently lives and works in Boston.