Liquid Experience, 1985

Oil on stitched and padded canvas with mirrors
© Pacita Abad; courtesy of Pacita Abad Art Estate. Photo by Max McClure.

Pacita Abad began her formal art training at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, in 1976. Thanks to her husband’s work as a development economist—whom Abad met in the Bay Area, where she was a student at the University of San Francisco in the 1970s—the couple lived in multiple countries across six continents. In each new environment, Abad painted, researched traditional art-making techniques, and collected local textiles, masks, and beads. Around 1981 she developed a signature technique that she called “trapunto,” in reference to a five-hundred-year-old quilting style of Italian origin in which designs are “stuffed” from underneath to create relief effects. To make these paintings, Abad stitched and padded large pieces of canvas by hand. She then painted and embellished them with colorful materials amassed from her travels. Liquid Experience is one of the artist’s earliest abstractions. Its vivid surface—glimmering with tiny reflective disks that imply a familiarity with shishah, or mirror embroidery, from India—demonstrates Abad’s fearlessness as a colorist.