Blue Spruce

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nka Essenhigh's fluid, dreamlike imagery—often the result of automatic drawing and free association—references graphic novels and the golden age of animation. Part of a group of contemporary figurative painters in New York (including John Currin, Will Cotton, and Lisa Yuskavage), she is also associated with Pop Surrealism. Recent large-scale landscape paintings of weather and passing seasons share the high-gloss surfaces and accentuated colors of her figures. While earlier, enamel works focused on line and flatness, her move to oil paint in 2001 has resulted in a sculptural, almost three-dimensional style.