Space, time, and exuberant uncertainty

Painter Isabel Riley on the creation of "How I Love Thee" at Michele Mercaldo Jewelry.

Substack, Ocean in a drop, CATE MCQUAID March 25, 2025

Structure anchors Isabel Riley’s paintings, amid colors like blossoms and, perhaps most importantly, space. Capricious, playful space, like a child darting around in a game of hide-and-seek. Isabel’s gestures create a sense of motion and instability. Even the structures –

something to cling to, guideposts like the lead lines in a stained glass window – sometimes smear and cloud.

Isabel’s exhibition Out of Thin Air in Michele Mercaldo Jewelry’s new, bigger gallery on Waltham Street in Boston’s South End has an apt title, as if – poof! – each painting captures one dizzy moment in an ever-changing universe, and oh, my, that moment is a universe in

itself. The artist’s unabashedly joyful palette – candy pinks, buzzy blues, and the sharp greens of newly budded leaves – suggests that all this action may be uncertain, but it’s not chaos.

Really, it’s more like a party, maybe with a séance going on in the back room.

When she’s not painting in her studio, Isabel is a scenic artist on film sets. In that role, she crafts the stamp of time – rust, peeling paint, water stains. Her attention to the way age wears on a wall informs the way she handles space on her painted panels: uncharted and full of incident.

Isabel writes:

The imagery in my paintings is derived by the surface and what I see there. By staring at this space I conjure “out of thin air” the imagery and scenery that becomes my picture. In this case, I used the tape to make vertical edges of pink paint. Then I dragged a printmaking squeegee to pull the paint to the right, creating Rorschach-like waves. These provide yet another structure to react to. During the making of these surfaces, I hand-sand and use an orbital sander to create transparencies and keep the surface smooth and full of visual depth.

I love pink and blue and decided to balance the organic wavy pink verticals with more structure – blue shards of color. The blue was slowly added in as well as some sparse yellow drawing and marks – notably at the bottom of the painting. Red, yellow and blue – a traditional approach!

This painting was uniquely decisive for me. The beauty of the early process dictated the end result more quickly than usual. Sometimes we are lucky and the picture tells us clearly when it is finished.