dena novak

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work begins in the body—not always the visible body, but the felt one. The one that cracks, softens, overheats, trembles, and transforms. The one that refuses to behave. I build paintings that mirror this internal space: layered, excavated, resisting erasure. Each painting becomes a site of accumulation and reconstruction, operating somewhere between wound and bloom. I am drawn to material processes that carry their own histories of resistance and decay—thick oil paint, raw pigment, carved surfaces—and I engage them through repetition, excavation, and revision. My work is driven by what it means to endure and to shape beauty through that endurance. My own work follows the impulse to refigure personal rupture into forms that can hold others. Living with autism and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome has profoundly shaped both my perception and my process. Autism heightens my sensitivity to color, rhythm, atmosphere, and pattern, while Ehlers-Danlos syndrome has made the physical labor of painting slow, demanding, and often painful. Building heavily layered surfaces requires endurance and continual adaptation. These are not simply limitations; they have become methodologies. The repetitive acts of layering, carving, scraping, and rebuilding mirror the ways the body adapts, remembers, and persists. I paint through resistance, allowing physical labor to become embedded in the work itself. My materials are not metaphors for the body; they are active participants in it. Paint resists,...

Artwork