From Shape to Form
Blue Velvet SKIN DEEP Painting
This body of work is representative of my interest in intersection of material and image. One reason I work with crushed velvet is that it is very optical -- it creates a field which at once refers to the use of the fabric in the world (and with crushed velvet, that goes often to garments, curtains, costumes) and also creates a highly optical space which functions as a contrast to the gestural, textural, and textual space of the painted elements of the work. The other fabrics I use also tend toward a painterly, optical space through transparency and patterning. This is similar to how I choose the text for the work, as words or phrases that feel spoken rather than written, and of the world. Often the words are found in my day-to-day interactions with others, overheard within the urban clutter and movement of New York, and they seek to introduce a colloquial gesture in the paintings that point to both subject matter and the trace of a speaker. My experience with visual and emotional structure in life is that of overlay, of interfering structures of content, as in watching the variedly casual and intimate experiences of strangers in the city, or understanding from the visual cues of demeanor and appearance the huge differences of intention, desires, lifestyle, and opinion of a row of people sitting together on the subway. These fragments point to the systems they describe, but taken together one atop the other, they produce a density of emotion and meaning which I seek to re- present in the paintings.