Depth of the Surface: New Paintings by Melinda Cootsona

"Painter Melinda Cootsona chose the title 'A Sense of Place' for her September 2013 show at The Studio Shop long before “Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years” opened at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum and art historians launched a series of lectures on his sense of place, though perhaps this is no coincidence. Cootsona expresses a clear love for the work of Diebenkorn and shares his figurative/abstract aesthetic and love of color. The paintings in Cootsona’s newest body of works offer similarly sensuous appreciation for the particular pleasures of California sunlight, but the “sense of place” she depicts may reflect a more psychological definition of the concept."