About

Debbie Ma’s abstract paintings, marked by their sense of order, balance, and a surface dynamism, have been informed by Ma’s studies in graphic design and inspired by a cross-section of modern masters ranging from Robert Ryman to Giorgio Morandi,  Miró,  Cy Twombly, Torres Garcia , and Antoni Tapies. 

Having worked for 25 years in product design for cosmetics companies, the Philippines-born artist, who lives on the North Shore of the East End of Long Island, earned a graduate degree in 1983 from the Parsons School of Design. She shifted to fine-art painting after visiting a gallery on 57th St., featuring Tápies paintings. Drawn to the Catalan artist’s boldly textured painted surfaces and distinctive use of non-traditional materials, she decided to travel to Barcelona, where she began to experiment with new media and paint with a freer hand.  

Ma has devised an international vocabulary of style embracing modernism, geometry, and the language of historic and contemporary art in works as disparate as painting, drawing, and sculpture.  Her use of white and its variants evoke ancient walls and sculptures, Italian frescoes, as well as the paintings of American Minimalist painter Robert Ryman and the Spanish artist Barceló.  Her choice of materials, such as her signature medium marble dust, lends her paintings a reflective quality and sculptural effect, and, as in Tapies’s later works, a sense of “meditative emptiness.” Ma notes how “Working with stone, albeit in powder form, demands the same physicality as carving. I always describe my paintings as two-dimensional sculptures because a lot of effort is made to create volume and thickness.”

Ma speaks many languages and filters them into her work, which is both varied and consistent, preoccupied as she is with materials and their surprising effects. There are Twombly-like marks, callligraphic jottings, and Jackson Pollock–evoking gestures and layering. She says she is fascinated with grids (but not too tightly administered) and can’t resist patterning and surface textures. Her use of geometry suggests how we view and measure what we see.

Surprisingly, having long worked mostly in monochrome, Ma has recently been experimenting with colors in her works, many with a sculptural impasto appearance where light and texture and complimentary tones on paper produce an unexpected degree of spontaneity. 

She says “The inspiration for these works is not so much the outside world or trending ideas, but the painting itself and the materials I use. The challenge is to tame a medium and make it succumb to what I want it to be.”