Madeline Tolins is an abstract painter residing in New Jersey. Throughout her career, Tolins has made paintings that examine the relationship between order and chaos, building up each painting as a call and response to the combined efforts of her hand and the medium itself. Tolins’ rich paintings pay homage to the Pattern and Decoration movement with a nod to the Fauves, Op Art, and Color Field Painting as evidenced by her contained wild environments of organic spilling shapes against hard lines with luscious transparencies and bold patterning. Her most recent body of work has been influenced by the solitude afforded by the collective loneliness of the last year. These new paintings are simultaneously quieter than her previous work, featuring a bright and fluid palette in which she builds her compositions from plant motifs that sometimes stray into representation. Her process has resulted in dreamy worlds that feel as if they could slip away should we try to hold them in our mind’s eye for too long.

As daily life was put on hold, stay-at-home orders put in place and humans everywhere were forced to pause and turn inward, Tolins saw a serendipitous opportunity to explore the micro-environment of her backyard, which seemed to grow larger the more intimately she got to know it. “As my world got smaller and smaller, I focused on what I could see in my backyard and rediscovered my fascination with the structures and patterns of natural forms that had drawn me to making art as a child,” Tolins remarks. With this rediscovered childlike wonder, Tolins began to abstract her painted forms from the geometry of the oldest patterns of all, those of nature. She found the variation and interruption of nature’s fractal patterns incredibly compelling, and it became Tolins’ aim to magnify and honor the small natural world lying right beyond her back doorstep. Tolins looked to ferns, magnolia blossoms, succulents, tree roots and other fragments of nature as inspiration to create her brilliantly painted meditations on the beauty found in imperfection. Tolins’ new nature inspired paintings are deeply calming and unapologetically feminine as they pull us into their mesmerizing worlds of swirling plant matter, imploring us to pause, appreciate and honor the resilient beauty of mother nature. As a radical act of kindness, these works offer us a moment of rest in an ever changing, immediate, chaotic world.

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