Trevor Spaulding reviews an exhibition of paintings by Lesley Vance at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through January 4, 2014.

Spaulding writes that "Vance, who began her career making representational still lifes, continues to start each painting with an object, photograph, or idea that serves as the impetus for the work. This is simply a strategy for getting some paint on canvas – a starting point. From there, she quickly abandons the original idea, often literally scraping the canvas clean with a palette knife. She then allows the painting to progress from that point based on its own internal logic. Many of the most dynamic moments in her paintings are a result of these scrapes… Vance builds her paintings around these momenta, adding shadows to suggest pictorial depth or blending opaque colors together to suggest form. But despite momentary flourishes of representation, the resulting image is firmly abstract and always untitled. Vance is clearly more interested in painterly concerns such as color and light quality then she is in depicting any recognizable objects."