Blair Vaughn-Gruler makes paintings that are driven by procedure and process. Accumulation, repetition, erasure, and the physical motions made in the process of mark-making harken back to her many years of practicing martial arts, and foreground the body’s relationship to painting. A Michigan native and New Mexico transplant, Vaughn-Gruler has been obsessed with paint since childhood. Her spare, non-objective compositions are exercises in organizing space. Even when shapes or lines repeat themselves to excess, a calm emerges from the chaos.As the conceptual love child of Cy Twombly and Agnes Martin, Vaughn-Gruler (born in 1955) makes paintings to reconcile her early modernist training with the lived experience of the information age. She holds a BFA in painting from Northern Michigan University and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Art. Artist Statement: Paint is, for me, an ointment, which I use to mediate the space between sets of potentially oppositional considerations, like body and imagination, or past and present. My practice is built around the process; of mark-making, repetition, accumulation, erasure, and the viscosity of the paint itself. I’m also concerned with my physical relationship to paint, including the motions inherent in the process of mark-making, and the many references this mark-making makes towards writing and reading. As the mark-making becomes deconstructed into lines, language is referenced but the meaning is left unclear. This circles around the idea of academic writing, which utilizes the formal elements and structure of written language. In my current work, meanings emerge, repeat, and then forget themselves back into the paint. There is a melding here, between the meaning-making activity in the brain and the visceral sensations in the body.