Allison Schulnik

Night Horses, 2005
Acrylic on Canvas
Gift of Mark Moore, 2007

With a degree in Experimental Animation from CalArts, Allison Schulnik’s paintings vibrantly echo her short film projects. She creates landscapes filled with eerie, forlorn figures whose clay bodies ooze and bloom bursts of colors in a writhing dance. Still, these offbeat and misshapen characters possess an ominous beauty and even a grace in their fluid movements. Often Schulnik’s paintings are so thickly layered in paint that they resemble clay; they still hold the same narrative quality and texture of her films.

Night Horses is done in acrylic on canvas, and depicts a sea of hundreds of horses. While Schulnik’s figures are abstracted from that of a ‘real’ horse, nothing about her style resembles anything overtly artificial. Rather, their fluid, organic lines share a likeness to what is found in nature. The dark blues, purples, and greens of the horses blend together to create a rippling wave. Her horses of night become transformed into a dark sea of water, moving with a chaotic grace through the canvas.

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