Hartling’s recent abstractions are poured, dripped, layered and scraped, finding an intuitive sense of balance between action and restraint, loss and recovery, to arrive at her image. Her surfaces embody the artist’s idiosyncratic ruminations and flashes of discovery, leaving residual traces of visceral texture.

She engages the transformative properties of oil paint in a dialogue with painting’s past, notably the heroic tradition of Abstract Expressionism, but on a vastly more intimate scale. Her paintings evoke geological time, with inter-laid strata of deep and shallow space, reflecting the long process of meditation and revision that eventually yields up a finished piece. Envisioning shape, color, line and texture as living forms that slip and shift above and below, in and out, of each other, Hartling reasserts her faith in painting as the perfect vessel to articulate the unspoken emotions and ideas swarming just beneath the surface of things.