For almost a decade, Shiao-Ping Wang taught drawing and painting from observation, and often worked with life models herself in the studio. She truly loved teaching, but she had been feeling a growing dissatisfaction with her own representational painting.

“I found that when I worked, from the figure particularly—it was most obvious when the subject I’m working on has the most affinity with myself—that I became very emotive. I would lose my artistic intelligence in the process.” It was opposite of what she had expected. She had thought that being emotionally engaged and thinking about subjects and symbolism would make her paint better.

 She tried harder, turning out a whole group of figure paintings. “It just got worse,” she says.

The tension produced a profound break through.

“I was excited and loved working with models. But my work did not benefit from the high energy. That’s how I found out this big secret about myself,” she says, gesturing toward her midsection. “It took many years. I had to really give up all that work I had done all those years … until I could re-make myself.”

She turned to abstraction, to which she had long been attracted, and felt she was working from a blank canvas for the first time. A look around her busy studio at the Salmon Falls Mills in Rollinsford reveals the result. One could trace a trail along the walls, from her first work to her most recent, but so many motifs reappear (punctuation, labyrinths, maps lattice and window designs), so many colors return  (reds, blues, yellows, and white), so many techniques are reapplied (cutouts, grids, collage) that it feels more like one is observing a developing language. 

“(Abstract painting) is almost like going to an empty room where I work without emotion, without a narrative, without symbolism. I have more emotional freedom to work. It’s like going to an open room and you can do whatever you want. …. There’s no anchor,” she says. “So you start doing things. Once you start doing things, you start to give yourself guidelines, instructions.”

Wang will discuss her new work and her process during the “Conversations With Artists” series at Portsmouth Public Library on Thursday, Dec. 8 at 7 p.m. Wang’s new work is also currently included in the “Conversations” group show at Artstream in Rochester.

During a recent visit at her studio, she talked about the past couple of years, since she took a break from teaching at the University of New Hampshire and turned to abstraction full time.

Wang came to art later than most, taking her first art class at age 28 after emigrating from Taiwan to Manhattan. After a brief segue into the world of art history, the former English major dropped into the artist’s life full time. Her husband, Brian Chu, whom she had met at college when he was a math major, quickly followed after she excitedly encouraged him to take a drawing class because she had so enjoyed the way it changed how she looked at the world. During school, the two supported themselves through odd jobs and selling their work on the streets; a professor eventually cited their work in a successful petition to change New York City law to allow artists to sell their work on the streets. Chu is now a painter and instructor at the University of New Hampshire.

The artistic references for her work are quite diverse. “I think it’s partially due to my late start in art—thus a more knowledge-based tendency in learning—and partially due to my constant attempt to integrate Chinese art into the work,” she says. Originally, she used two-dimensional patterns often found in Chinese ornamentation, like lattice work or architecture, in a pictorial way. Patterns led to grids, a sense of unit that became her anchor and gave her a basic sense of rhythm and order. In moving from representational painting to abstract work, she also began thinking more about navigation.

“Some people look for gesture or movement or symbolism. My visual tendency is to navigate among many things that appear in my vision.  In representational painting, you navigate in and out of space, you create illusionistic space. In abstraction, you navigate. You move left and right or up and down. You move across. But that to me is still navigating,” she says.

One early piece in this new cluster of work, “A Story,” is a series of colorful punctuation marks placed on a colorful grid. “I think in my mind I was trying to combine pictorial navigation with mental navigation. When we navigate mentally, it’s either through time, or in writing, punctuation is how you navigate. If there’s no punctuation, you go back and forth to try to make sense. I was trying to incorporate two systems of navigation. One is pictorial, one is something that is not tangible.” Using the period, comma, colon, semicolon and  hyphen, she created a vertical sequence for “A Story.” Unintentionally, each mark also ran diagonally. “I didn’t plan it that way. It looked too obvious. So I was forced to vary them. There was no navigation. It was too instructional. It gave you instructions to read in a certain way. So then I had to re-create this navigation.”

Wang was influenced by the works of Mondrian and Klee. She sees a sensibility of reductive, elemental beauty in Mondrian and admires Klee’s use of metaphor in a pictorial rather than literary or literal way.

One of her most recent pieces that brings these elements into play is the nearly quilt-like “Calendar,” a 29-by-40-inch work of mixed media on paper. Interpreted literally as a calendar, small squares aligned in 12 horizontal rows represent 28-, 30- and 31-day months. The squares, like little windows painted to follow the changes of the season, enlarge on days with more sunlight and condense on short winter days. The grid is punctured with thread, sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious. The finished piece turned out to be a little more complex than she intended. So she began work on a white calendar, using all white materials. Underneath that on her work table is the beginnings of a moon phase calendar. She sees herself shifting from found patterns to creating her own patterns. Working alone in the studio or comparing notes with her husband on how things are going, she finds one of the elemental building blocks of her work and her life to be the concept that every day has a story to tell.

Contemplating the repetition of days, or the water motifs in the cascading, paper and vellum pieces called “Waves” and “Cycle” brings emotion to her work. But it’s different than before. She says sometimes she finds herself drawing grids or punctuation, “and sometimes in the middle of the most mundane thing, I’ll burst into tears.” But it’s not as if she’s responding to a model. It’s a less personal kind of feeling. “But when I think of water and I think of time and water is forever there, there are times I think of mortality, my aging parents, the possibility that they may one day be gone. That’s the way that even a sort of impersonal piece can sometimes evoke very tangible, real life emotions as well… that’s life,” she says.