In this her third New York City solo exhibition, Heather Stivison explores the intersection of environmental science and visual art with a series of immersive paintings of the ocean. 

Stivison paintings capture the essence of water—something clear and colorless, with its shape formed entirely by the external forces of objects, land, wind, gravity. Searching for water’s most primary qualities, she uses light, color, form, shape, line, to engender a sense of water. Fluidity, reflections, rhythms are evident in her ocean surface paintings. Stivison is fascinated by the reflections and patterns created by the coastal ocean surface. She paints variations on patterns, exploring how much she can change them and still maintain the sense that the subject is surface water. 

Curator and director of Manhattan Arts International Renee Phillips writes:

“Stivison ventures beyond nature’s physical boundaries into abstraction with the profusion of free-flowing biomorphic patterns and tonal ranges. In her paintings the innate attributes of water evolve into metaphors, symbolism and visual poetry.”

The exhibition includes a massive 110-inch quadriptych that explores the sense of weightlessness and mystery that she finds in the imagining unknown ocean depths. Other paintings explore surface water patterns as abstract design.

Independent curator Kathy Imlay writes:

“Stivison’s paintings have a luminous glow—accomplished by the artist building up layer upon layer of viscous paint, which she pours, smears, scrapes and otherwise manipulates to create fields of color that conjure the watery depths of the ocean or intergalactic space, depending on the palette.”

Some of the paintings on view are the result of her multi-year, grant funded collaboration with Noah Germolus, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who was researching ocean chemistry. Stivison created two paintings about him and his work, and four five-foot paintings that interpret his research data in paint.

The collaboration led to a unique special feature of this exhibition. After Stivison interpreted his data in paint, he in turn, interpreted four of her paintings in music. The exhibition includes an on-demand sound installation of original jazz music composed and performed by Germolus.