Jaime Desimone interviews painter Jill Nathanson on the occasion of the exhibition Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction at MOCA Jacksonville, on view through September 4, 2016. The show features works by Nathanson as well as Keltie Ferris, Maya Hayuk, Fran O’Neill, Jackie Saccaccio, and Anke Weyer.

Nathanson remarks: “I approach the painting as a vital field of color energies, yet my paintings are made of shapes, strongly contrasting colors, edges of all kinds. They are made of parts and are not at all continuous fields of energy. I’ve never wanted to do reduced paintings of misty quasi-monochromes. I work with tension between colors and among shapes, engaging with all kinds of painting relations, so my approach to painting has always been full of contradictions. In the last few years, I found a way to embrace contradiction through illogical layers of transparent color, letting color energies construct the painting while all kinds of shapes and incidents just overlap and build up color.”