fabric & me

I've always liked patterned fabric. I have, currently, an overflowing grocery bag full of scraps of old clothes stuffed in the back of the terror-jungle that it my closet. I've made a few quilts with them, starting from the traditional patchwork squares to the one I'm currently "working" on (quotes signal that in this context, "working" means "leaving it sitting on my dresser for the past six months") is more of a landscape, complete with silver raindrops (old curtains left over from when my room was space-themed in middle school) and elephants. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that I like patterned fabric because for me, it evokes memory, the way that old clothes and blankets do.

For a while, I was in the habit of painting very intricate patterns in the backgrounds of my paintings. You can see some of them in the Woods series that I discussed earlier. It was, to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass. So one day in the summer, I stretched and primed these three canvases--er, non-canvases. Huntingtons I and II are primed with clear gesso, which I don't recommend as it dries to a weird, sandy sort of texture that is difficult to work with, particularly on a small scale. It can also fog up the fabric itself. Croton Point is primed with acrylic gloss medium, which s nice and smooth and wonderful. (Note: If you choose to try this, be sure to coat the front and the back of the cloth several times with the priming medium, as fabric like this is much thinner and has a more open weave than canvas.) They are quite small, the largest of them being only a foot square.

Painting on fabric is really fun. For one thing, the painting surface becomes part of the image, and you can fade it in and out of the painted areas with a pretty nice effect. These are all based pretty literally on photographs. Huntington I (Shadows), top, and Huntington II (Starfields), center, are taken from photographs of my mother and aunt as kids with some of their younger cousins. They're weird photos, in that little square 1960s format, taken by kids in strong summer sunlight, lending them a strange and spontaneous sort of quality. Croton Point, at the bottom, is based on a photo taken by me, of my friend and his now-ex-girlfriend, about two years ago. The weird brown animals are my own invention. Fittingly, my mother brought me the fabric samples of the Huntingtons, and the green piece I bought at a vintage shop in New Paltz. These are the first paintings in which I dealt with memory as a place, and I took a fairly literal approach, using photographs, which are what people commonly use to preserve memory.

the woods

So here is some (relatively) early work, from the spring of 2008. Ah, those were the days--fairy tales and their dark, adult interpretations. I have an annotated Brothers Grimm collection complete with gorgeous full-color illustrations from a variety of artists that helped with the progression of this series. They are all done in oil (no glazing! WTF was I thinking??) on canvas, all 18X24.

The series is called "The Woods," since a primary trope in fairy tales and folk tales involves the main character(s) going into the deep, dark scary woods; it's usually read as a metaphor for growing up and venturing into the world. The title of each painting is a line from a Grimms' tale. Top to bottom: What Big Teeth You Have; Where Are You Going, Dear Bear?; The Frog's Prediction Came True; First an Owl, Then a Raven, and Finally a Dove; and Let's Have a Taste, It's Sure to be Sweet. Their tales, respectively, are Red Riding Hood (which I really shouldn't even have to explain), Rose White & Rose Red, The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Hansel & Gretel.

These are all portraits of friends. With the exception of What Big Teeth You Have, they were all stolen from Facebook. It's kind of bad, how many personal photographs I steal from loved ones via Facebook (see the two photos in the previous posting). But that's the magic of Facebook, right? And no, I'm not going to go into detail about why I chose the tales for these people.

Stylistically? Um, I think I was still in a sort of horror-movie phase or something. Look at all those intricate patterns! Ever notice that horror movies made during the past decade really went to town on the Victorian wallpaper patterns and sick greens and purples? Note similarity. This was a denser, darker, more ornate time for me, I guess, and I'm kind of glad I'm over it...for the most part.

galatea

I just begun my Galatea painting--by begun I mean it's a series of sketchy lines on canvas that make sense only to me. It owes a bit to both images (bottom two, above and below: Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau). Stylistically, I suppose it's a bit more similar to Moreau, with the primary focus on the Galatea figure and the dark background. Or, it will be. We can only hope. It's something of a departure from what I've been doing, as well as from the things I've been looking at in terms of reference material. Much more ornate and flowery. But it's also the first painting I've done with such a blatantly classical theme; it somehow, therefore, seems appropriate. Or maybe it just seems that way to me.

And seriously, isn't Redon's cyclops like the cutest thing EVER?

The images preceding the Galateas are the kinds of things I've been liking lately. Kind of a faded memory, old family photograph, memory-blending-with-imagination-type thing. Vast and unknown landscapes of the interior and exterior alike.

Something like that.