Essay by Paris Gilstrap

     Water as a medium is somewhat unpredictable in how it spreads and crawls, allowing the artist to guide it only to a certain extent. In Makenzie Heinemann's paintings, water as a medium constantly flows through the landscapes and forms in her paintings to abstract them. 

     Heinemann's paintings engage with the minimal and the abstract painters, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, as well as magical realism seen in the mystical to the mundane. Heinemann attributes her figural avoidance to her spiritual upbringing in Judaism and experimentation with composition, color, and application to find the mystic.

     Heinemann describes how water makes the final marks and decisions in how her paint takes shape on the canvas. She defines the "wet process" as "a balance between intention and restraint." The process consists of many washes and dumping of water onto the layered canvases to mix with the canvases below and create new paintings underneath. This process allows her to create compositions that are undefined without clear figural boundaries influenced by Erin Manning's "Politics of Touch" in which your senses are simultaneously affecting and affected by everything with unpredictable exchanges. 

     Water blurs the lines of figuration and eliminates the boundaries of representation in her paintings-although the landscapes and bodies still remain distantly recognizable.

     Heinemann experiments with perspective, as seen in Baby at the Waterfall (2021), which has a focal point of lightness central to the painting that draws the eye inward with only a suggestion of form and interconnectedness as the marks blend with the darker purples, blues, and yellows. The center features a flash of light within the flow of water marks revealing something growing out of the darkness and potential decay. The painting engages with Heinemann's interest in the language of opacity, which is different in painting and in life, through obscuring meaning and transparency. The work imbues beauty not just for aesthetic means, but as a gesture of care for a restful visual experience.

 Erin Manning, Politics of Touch Sense, movement, sovereignty. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.)