Born in the Catskill Mountains, Tumasella has always felt closely attuned to the natural world, so she looks to nature to find parallels with what might be thought of as the landscape of emotions and experience.
Like many artists from the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s onward, Tumasella welcomes the unexpected in her paintings. Instead of using brushes, she applies paint with a roller, a tool she first used in a printmaking class she took at Maryland Institute College of Art, where she earned her BFA. Rolling the paint on allows her to experiment continually, sometimes hiding layers of paint under an opaque sheet of color, sometimes barely veiling them with a thin film of cream or green. As the paint on the roller gets thin, the color stutters and breaks up, and other hues leap out through the gaps.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about chance,” she said. “How it relates to life and to painting. Interacting with a painting is a lot like how we interact in life. For me it’s about finding the moments and really appreciating them.”
In “Butler Island,” a four-foot -panel, brilliant red-orange sings out against shades of turquoise and streaks of soft pale green, but there are no specific details to be seen. The red-orange could be red Georgia soil glimpsed at the edge of crops in riverside farm fields, or it might be sunset light glinting off ice floes in the Antarctic sea or the water around an island in Maine. You can find the name Butler Island in all of these places and others.
Each is a very different landscape, but through her painting, Tumasella seeks to distill what they have in common. Concentrating on color and texture, she homes in on a deeper, more universal experience of landscape, something she sees as parallel with the human experience.
“The human condition is universal,” she said, “I don’t mean to discount individuality, but I’m seeing the landscape in time and space, like a pure emotion, seeing in a meditative space when everything else falls away.” http://reginatumasella.com/home.html
