Selina Foote
Selina Foote is an abstract painter whose practice is deeply rooted in a conversation with art history. Drawing from historical portraits—particularly those painted by women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Berthe Morisot—Foote reimagines their compositional elements through a process she refers to as "gleaning". Beginning with a reproduction from an exhibition catalogue or monograph, Foote abstracts the image into a drawing, isolating particular visual cues—a curved line, a shadow, a patch of colour—which then become the anchors for the painting to emerge.
Her paintings are not reinterpretations, but transformations. Through a highly mediated process involving drawing, gridding, and the slow layering of acrylic and graphite, the original source becomes almost indiscernible. Yet a trace lingers. Often, areas of the canvas are left unpainted, allowing the viewer to glimpse graphite scaffolding from the work's early stages—a gentle reminder of the origin behind the abstraction.
Foote's compositions are structured by the grid, a formal device that aligns her with a lineage of geometric abstractionists such as Agnes Martin and Sonia Delaunay. In her most recent work, this structural clarity is animated by sinuous black lines that ripple across the surface, evoking both the mechanical precision of Marcel Duchamp and the lyrical curves of early modernist abstraction. These wave motifs—drawn using homemade tools like spice jar lids and glassware—lend the works a dynamic sense of motion and spatial play, appearing to hover above anchored blocks of colour.
Though rooted in historical portraiture, Foote's paintings ultimately step away from figuration and narrative. They exist as autonomous visual objects— meticulously composed, quietly rigorous, and rich with the subtle tensions between movement and stillness, memory and invention, structure and sensuality.
