About

Debbie Ma (1957- ), American, born in the Philippines of Chinese descent is a graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York.  She is both graphic and fine artist whose designs have successfully graced products of major cosmetic companies. She has painted all her life and has used her extensive experience in graphic design in her paintings. She currently lives and works on the North Shore East End of Long Island.

Her large abstract paintings explore the complex dimensionality of geometric forms in a mostly monochromatic palette and texture. She creates a tapestry of quiet patterns that exude expressiveness through the palpable matrix of marble dust and pigments. 

Her works are marked by their sense of order, balance and a surface dynamism informed by her studies in graphic design and inspired by a cross-section of modern masters. Her use of white and its variants evoke ancient walls and sculptures, Italian frescoes, as well as paintings by American Minimalist Robert Ryman and Spanish artist Miguel Barcelo. Her choice of materials, such as her signature medium of marble dust, lends her paintings a reflective quality, sculptural effect, and evokes, as in the later works of Antonio Tapies, a sense of “meditative emptiness”. She 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 significant effort is made to create volume and thickness.”

Ma speaks many artistic languages and filters them into her work, which is both varied and consistent, preoccupied as she is with materials and their provocative effects. There are Cy Twombly-like marks, calligraphic jottings, and Jackson Pollack-evoking gestures and layering. She employs grids, but not too tightly administered, embellished with complex patterning and surface textures.

Having long worked mostly in monochromes and neutral colors, she has made forays into the use of color in her works, many with a sculptural impasto appearance where light, texture, and complimentary tones in works on paper produce a remarkable degree of spontaneity.

“The inspiration in my works is not so much the outside world or trending world views, but the painting itself and its materials. The challenge is to tame an unyielding and expressive medium and make it succumb to what I want it to be. Viewers often ask me what my paintings mean. My response is, “Does it speak to you?” My aim is to capture your eyes with my paintings and never let them go. I want viewers to create their own stories and meanings. A work should speak for itself and nothing else.