The Practiced Gesture

Essay by Svetlana Zueva

One of the most persistent misconceptions surrounding Vivian Springford’s work is that her abstractions emerged through accident — stains and spills surrendered to chance. Beneath the apparent ease of her surfaces lies a disciplined practice, preserved in hundreds of studies on rice and mulberry paper where gesture was rehearsed, refined, and held in balance.

These studies are instructive. The same movements — a sweeping arc, a coiled stroke, a weighted curve — recur across the paper sheets. Springford repeated each gesture until it settled into muscle memory, training the hand as a calligrapher trains the brush. Only once the form had been fully absorbed did she turn to canvas, executing the mark in a single, decisive passage.

What appears spontaneous is, in fact, practiced. These works are not improvisations but rehearsals made visible — deliberate, precise, and sustained over time. Springford’s alignment is less with the rhetoric of gesture painting than with the lineage of East Asian calligraphy and Taoist thought, where mastery is understood not as control but as balance. Discipline becomes a form of release. The stroke holds energy because it has been prepared to do so.

Seen through this lens, Springford’s early abstractions shift in meaning. They are not experiments but acts of concentration — meditations on rhythm, pressure, and form grounded in principles of harmony and inevitability. The Practiced Gesture establishes the foundation for the work that follows: the rice paper mountings, the aerial pools, the expansionist compositions, the submerged and cosmic passages of her later years.

Each transition in Springford’s practice begins here, with the discipline of the hand. The gesture was never incidental. It was practiced, internalized, and released — a sustained meditation in paint, repeated until it became inevitable.

Svetlana Zueva is a writer and researcher, and the founder of Quiet Modernism.