These vibrant abstract paintings by Joan Stuart Ross celebrate color and sizzle with dynamic mark-making. She freely combines and dances between mediums while deftly employing color and pattern to create an uplifting sensibility, treating color as emotion, psyche, and spirit. Eloquent rhythms of obsessive pattern repetition transmute color, marks, and personal iconography into layered visual narratives.

Two distinct series meld into a cohesive body of work in this exhibition. Encaustic paintings on panel offer luminosity and depth and carry narratives from above to below the surface through multiple layers of melted beeswax and damar resin mixed with pigments. Collaged snippets cut from the artist's original ink drawings are embedded and revealed within. Large-format mixed-media paintings vibe and shimmer with many layers of intense color applied with expressive mark making combining oil sticks, collage, and printmaking on paper or canvas.