As with every new work, decisions are made moment by moment. “Lush” demanded an endless number of those decisions, with some hinging on the possibility of abandoning the painting altogether. Some time away usually helped see what needed to be done and kept the painting going. But I lived with it everyday, considering it even when brushing my teeth.

Sometimes I feel, as other artists do, that naming a painting limits the interpretation, but in this case, there is no doubt, in my opinion, of the descriptive power of “Lush”.

“LUSH”  2011     Acrylic on canvas      60 x 40 inches

Today’s professional photograph marks the completion of that process and provokes the challenge of the much larger canvas waiting. Will the dots continue?

NEBULA 2011 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30"

Like many of the pieces that belong in “The Threads Project”, these paintings recall the process of accretion. Whether using thread in “thread-stitches” that slowly build the object or image, these new paintings accumulate dots of color to create complex patterns. And while the idea or image that inspired them may be apparent, the actual process may lead to other directions, leaving the origins perhaps only faintly discernible by the time the painting reaches its conclusion.

By now the newest painting, called “Nebula”, a word that conjures up the whirling masses of the Universe, has taken many new turns. While the original staining called up far more minimal interests of the past, obsessiveness claimed this work as the process continued.

 ”Nebula”  

Works immediately preceding this painting can be seen in a new Page which has a slideshow and gallery of images.

NEW PAINTINGS 2008-2011

THE OTHER SIDE OF PARIS

This link will take you to Blurb and a fifteen-page peek at it. A gallery of images can also be found on my Page of the same name~The Other Side of Paris.

NEBULA continues the staining process of the preceding paintings, RED DELTA and TIDEMARK. I’ve decided to document the process a bit and so keep the camera at hand for rather candid photos as I progress. From these the thought process, the decisions that are made, can be seen.

NEBULA -Day One        acrylic on canvas  30 x 30 inches

The small white areas are thick drops of fluid acrylic, as in the previous works, standing as gem-like centers for flurries of marks to come.

Some days into the painting brings a bit of intensity to the colors, and a search for pattern.

As I continue painting I realize that the link between the textile work and the painting remains strong. This painting has the range of color and appearance of a long-ago textile, dye on silk that was one of my first efforts. I often remarked that it was actually a painting on silk.

GEMSTONE       Fiber-reactive dye on silk habotai

Writing this, I am reminded of something that Louise Bourgeois wrote long ago and which I noted in one of my journals, perhaps mid-Seventies. I was searching then to find “clues” from the thoughts and writing of other artists whose works I found intriguing. To paraphrase, I believe she wrote that as artists “All we do is repeat and repeat and repeat.”  These words echo often in my own thoughts as I now look back on my own work. Our repetition may exist but hopefully we find that our “vocabulary” of imagery grows larger and continues to be inventive. The richness of our thinking can expand this vocabulary, to create what I like to think of as “The Richest Expression”. Which all leads back to my basic question, “How do the material and process affect the meaning in art?”

In anticipation of the final version of the book, I have created a page,  THE OTHER SIDE OF PARIS, which gives a look into that project.

But the painting is finished, joining the series of TIDEMARK and DELTA. “Red Delta” continues the use of textural contrasts, patterns of dots, and the usual obsessive mark-making that began with the  series of canvases such as DREAMING OF INDIA.

As with the earlier “Delta”, “Red Delta” is a square, thirty inches by thirty inches, one of my favorite sizes and shapes. Borrowing from an architect’s description, I like the “gravity” of the square, while this size is large enough to evoke a presence without inviting huge expanses to complicate the complexity of layers and marks.

RED DELTA 2011 Acrylic on canvas 30 x 30"

Although the actual act of painting has been fairly absent for a while, the mental work of painting has not, nor is another part of art-making, digital photographs. The next work in painting seems to point in the direction of a pair, one black, one white, but continuing the type of surfaces of the “Delta” pieces. Meanwhile, I have just finished a new book of inverted photographs called “The Other Side of Paris”. I will post a link and information on this project as soon as the initial proof copy has been received.

This photo shows the middle stage of the painting as I began to layer thin washes which left a darker edge or “tidemark” as the pools of fluid acrylic dried.

I realized as I worked on the painting that the staining and puddles of color and resulting tidemarks were much like a particular technique I used in my hand-dyed textiles years ago.

The next photo shows the technique in textile dyeing for which the painting is named. A tidemark in textile design is often a negative result in which dark edges in the dyed area appear as salts and chemicals dry. I decided to make use of this effect to my advantage and created one of my earliest designs by utilizing this “fault”.

PETRA     Fiber-reactive dye on habutai silk     36 x 36 inches

Below, the finished painting with details:

TIDEMARK  acrylic on canvas  48 x 24 inches

DETAIL

DETAIL

Allowing the puddles of paint to dry results in edges which form “fences” like the tidemarks in the textile dyeing process. Putting color on cloth in textiles using tidemarks clearly offers similar expressive opportunities in what is thought of as painting in a more formal sense. Without realizing I was again blurring the boundaries of “fine art” and “craft/design”.

I owned my first computer at the time that this experimentation began. Installed in it was the basic Paint program. I stumbled upon it and began to play a bit with the idea of drawing digitally. Immediately I began to see the linear relationship to my threads pieces and began to work with this in color and black and white.

BEATRICE’S  THREADS  2002

STRINGS  2002

THREAD LACE 2002

THREAD LACE II  2002

As “The Threads Project” progressed the idea of using actual thread and layers came into the work. This 2003 piece used thick thread sewn to tulle. Beneath the cream thread lies a single black thread. The earlier digital drawing, along with others, explored the idea of layers.

SINGULAR  2003  Thread, machine-sewn to tulle, hand-sewn to Okawara paper 14 x 11.75″

The digital drawings provided yet another method of using the idea of analagous images, but in a way entirely unanticipated. The linear quality of these digital drawings echoed that of thread of course, but also changed my ideas of what exactly constituted a drawing in my previous experience. The need for paper or any other physical support was unnecessary. The images remained “virtual” until printed in some way. Until then no boundaries existed except the frame of a monitor or computer screen. These images could be understood as thumbnails or “sketches” for other work such as an installation or sculpture. They could be fully-realized works on paper or fabric using a printing method of some kind. They certainly bore evidence of the maker’s hand yet not in any way I had ever before used.

 One other element of the digital drawings was the use of inverting the images. This experiment provided a method that again, proved fertile much later when I began to work with digital photographs.

INVERTED THREADS  I  2003

Black and white digital drawings as well as more digital drawings in color can be seen in the Page -DIGITAL DRAWINGS FROM THE THREADS PROJECT.

LINEAR STRATEGY BLACK VI  2002