Terry Ekasala
Riding through

Take My Hand 

Terry Ekasala is a heart that beats furiously and she’s keeping painting alive - not just for herself, but for countless others who know her work to be authentic, rigorous, earnest and fierce. In her hands, the material crackles with energy: her strokes writhe and efface, smash and nuzzle one another. Her color is so loose and wide-ranging as to suggest carelessness but a longer look reveals a near total absence of murky indecision. On the contrary: the smack of her gestural strengths are often coyly balanced; nuanced by uncanny color choices that ignite dynamism.

Hers is an expressionistic practice to be sure; and one that delights in chromatic and compositional theatrics, reminiscent of Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn. Like her forebears, her process has a type of athletic engagement with the medium guided by an agile and curious mind.

Painting has the capacity to explore and inhabit the corporal and cerebral spaces of human inquiry. Artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse deconstructed the very architecture of the picture while revealing the mind’s willingness to both see and think about things from multiple vantage points at once. Hilma af Klint and Paul Klee, among many others, brought emotion and spirituality to geometry, liberating it from mathematics while Edvard Munch painted the many moods of the soul. Ekasala’s paintings pull casually from these artists’ work with an affectionate coupling that results in pictures whose skewed perspectives and frenetic reworking exhibit a kind of historical shorthand where tried strategies are put to new and personal tests.

In Those Days in Paradise, 2025 a reclining figure, dozing comfortably, traverses the canvas, her outlined form essentially indistinguishable from the layers of scumbled paint that articulate her surroundings. Loose grids are rendered in blues, pinks and greys around her figure, suggesting perhaps, the textile patterns of foreign towels and the terracotta tiles of a friend’s guest house near the Mediterranean. Matisse had a wildly prolific period in 1920’s Nice, France, and this painting feels like a type of reminiscence of time spent there collaborating with the late master.

Indeed, Ekasala’s work provides a sort of living testimony to the ongoing power of painting itself. In her studio, investigations into the mind, into nature and the means and methods of those adventures are constantly at hand. That is not to say that the pieces appear to struggle, for they do not. In fact, Ekasala has an unmistakable facility with paint and to her great credit, does not rely on that grace to make tidy, facile paintings.

Family, 2024 is a large densely layered work where numerous figures seem to coalesce in the embrace of a vaguely patriarchal figure, seen in profile, standing taller than the rest. Sheaves of deep green paint surround the family group like curtains made of heavy velvet. The painting might be a portrait of a family across numerous generations, depicting characters both living and lost – a practice seen before, in 18th century European art. The “family” mounds together en masse and six or seven different faces appear to orbit together. Some are ghostly and translucent (every family certainly has its phantoms) while an opaque yellow form is cradled by an arm, suggestive perhaps, of a newborn baby, brimming with energy and protected by the huddle. 

Ekasala is a resolute and laboring artist. The quality of her quotidian output, which she shares on social media, is staggering. These swift, often terrific acrylic compositions on Stathmore paper. should make any painter envious. She routinely discovers the magic in the process of moving the material around and her pictures often whisper a quiet chat with great artists of the past: Giorgio Morandi and De Chirico, Philip Guston and Constantin Brancusi among them. Ekasala’s work is a testament to the enduring potential of painting as a practice with the distinct capacity to move in numerous directions of inquiry simultaneously. There are gestural and chromatic experiments to discover; narrative threads to weave, and a propulsive momentum to push the story going forwards while keeping an ear to the songs of the past. 

Indeed, the artist and her prolific output uniquely apprehend the world and its innumerable vistas while illuminating the faceted interiors of the self. 

Alex Weinstein Los Angeles/Providence RI, 2025