Aesthetic Expression: Deborah Dancy and Abstract Beauty
Deborah Dancy
As our world becomes increasingly connected through technological innovations, a greater portion of our lives becomes a blur. The view from the window of an Amtrak train, the pixels that make up our faces on a Zoom call, the constant cycle of mass media pouring into our minds. It becomes increasingly difficult to find a moment of peace to reflect on ourselves and the world around us when it all seems to be moving and mixing at a million miles an hour.
To those who curate the aesthetics of our world – artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, and advertisers – this underlying chaos may harken the need for an ethos of serenity, in which the appearances and art of our society give our lives a clear and concrete meaning.
Deborah Dancy, an African American visual artist, thinks otherwise. Mainly known for her work in abstract oil painting, Dancy was raised in Bessemer, Alabama, and graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1973 with her bachelor’s degree. She went on to earn her master’s in printmaking and painting from Illinois State University in 1976 and 1979, respectively. She taught painting at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, from 1981 to 2017 and continues to create visual artworks in paint, photography, and mixed media to this day. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, her work is on display in museums and collections across the globe, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The United States Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe.
In her paintings, Dancy explores the purpose of aesthetic beauty in our world, not as a response to its chaos, but as a cultivation of its elements. Through her paintings, she attempts to reflect a kind of beauty inspired by fragments and objects of her everyday life without relying on their specific uses. Her paint is ethereal, portraying blends of color, unfinished figures, and sporadic dots. This fashions an aesthetic unto itself, with no purpose other than to reflect beauty and its inherent tension. For instance, in her 2024 oil painting “Mapping Tomorrow,” Dancy manipulates the paint in the background of the image to create a horizontally blurred effect. The landscape is a mélange of colors with no discernible figures. The lines and dots superimposed on this horizontally uncertain landscape give us hints toward a narrative, notions of what we are looking at and where we are going. Yet Dancy leaves these concrete forms unfinished to illustrate not a simple peace but an aesthetic tension.
An interpretation of Dancy’s work is not complete without taking into account the reflective aspect of art. The post-modern approach gives the audience the option to see their own lives in the work of art if they want; however, the philosophy also reminds the audience that their interpretations will fail, for it believes that no meaning is final. One might be tempted to say that Dancy’s work is not an illustration of anything in particular and that the only way to properly see the art is to see it as it is: a combination of colors and figures in harmony. Any meaning, then, is not the effect of the art but the reflection of one’s inner consciousness.
But even this approach to Dancy’s art leaves us unable to see the art in its entirety, for the representations overlaid on the background create a clear discord in what should be a harmonious visual image. Take her 2022 acrylic painting “Blind Faith,” for instance. On top of a light green and white background with an array of black lines, a light purple blob blocks our field of view. Dancy stamps on the painting, like a handprint on a cave wall, leaving us with the question: who did this, and why?
Dancy also does not shy away from tackling political issues in her art. Her series of paintings on paper, “The Weight of a Million Black Stars,” which was inspired by the murder of George Floyd, shows an array of black lines and forms upon a chaotic background of paint, expressing her intense emotion at such a tragedy. She uses crushed rock on the canvas to color these forms, mimicking the brutality of a man’s body pushed into pavement. Despite her abstract style, Dancy remains connected to the political realities of the world through diligent artistic choices.
Dancy does not provide any sterile answers. She wants her audience to question the idea of a harmonious piece of art, completed by clear intentions and meanings. She explores the tension of art as it struggles between natural and artificial activity. She doesn’t seek to justify her art through a whole narrative; instead, she starts, stops, and creates interruptions to show her audience that her art does not fit into a neat narrative. In her words, “painting explores what I consider as embracing the unpredictable and accidental.” Dancy is an outspoken representative for those who are not given clean answers from life, and her artistic self-expression embodies finding the beauty in that turmoil.
