DESCRIPTION AND METHOD OF WORK

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Savini paints expansive gestural abstractions. In her most recent pieces, sometimes as large as 38 inches by 108 inches, she uses two panels bolted together. Her “Blue Sand,” 2000, illustrates what Savini calls her “combination format,” where the “horizontal panel has to do with subjects of nature and landscape, while the other represents an expressly figurative or human presence.” “Sisters,” 1998, comprises two same-sized rectangles viewed vertically and merges the landscape with human presence in a celebration of shared qualities, like the similar upright stature of a person and a tree. Savini’s use and juxtaposition of color can be at once meditative and startling.

FAVORITE SUBJECT

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An avid camper and backpacker, Savini’s love of landscape and nature feeds her desire to paint. This love of the outdoors and search for the “sublime” is subtly evoked by her choices of color and light, and her gestural brush strokes.

ARTISTIC INFLUENCES

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Savini was inspired by childhood visits to rotating exhibits of the work of Hans Hofmann at the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California, as well as the pleasure of experiencing first-hand the work of fellow California artists Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still. Diebenkorn’s influence can be found in Savini’s extensive range of color choices and her use of light; her large canvases are reminiscent of Still’s work. Though not immediately apparent, Savini cites the Northern European Renaissance tradition as also having a potent effect on many of her decisions as an artist. In addition to admiring their use of vibrant color, surface and depth, the artist credits pieces such as Matthais Grünewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece” as inspiring her decision to use panel configurations as a format for her work.

METHOD

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Savini takes what she calls a “blue-collar approach to work.” Interested in the processes and tools of art-making since her youth, she is concerned with the order and ritual involved in the craft of art-making. She works, patiently and methodically, on one panel of a painting at a time. Through an intuitive and decisively “painterly” process of layering and scraping the surface of the canvas, she seeks to explore the possibilities of each piece, to do “what the painting needs to do.” Once the first panel has evolved to completion, it advises Savini on the creation of the second.

BIGGEST BREAK

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Savini was included in the Biennale Internazionale Dell’Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy, 1999, where she was awarded the “Lorenzo de Medici Medal in Painting.” That same year, she also was selected for the Juried Group Exhibition, Carnegie Center for the Arts, Turlock, California.

ONE EXPERT'S OPINION

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“Unabashedly beautiful, Tinna Savini’s work offers us dynamic complexity and subtle discriminations of color,” says Carmen Roxanne Robbin, professor of art history at California State University, Stanislaus. “She uses formal language of such movements as the Abstract Expressionists, but makes it fresh and very contemporary by vigorously fusing these gestures with the spatial structure, tonality and the sense of narrative found in Renaissance art.”