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Poke
In my first memories of making art, I am at my aunt’s
house in Cleveland: making little poke-marks on the wall and braiding
the fringe on her brocade sofa. Decades later, here I am: still
marking up surfaces and playing with fabric. Almost all the work
was done by poking a single needle into bits and pieces of felt,
a process that causes me to marvel as hundreds of tiny holes gather
to create a whole.
Underlying this series are the twin themes of “there
but for the grace of God go I” and “the meek shall inherit
the earth.” These themes have been present in my work for decades
now, as I have long held a reverence for the special beauty of the
worn, the spent, the frayed, the tattered, threadbare and bruised.
In the past, this reverence manifest as paintings of rag-puppets
in broken-down industrial settings. I love to juxtapose the unexpected
and, for the paintings, I studied the techniques of old Dutch masters
to impart a luminous beauty to the desolate scenes of shabby figures
bending over their various ramps, chutes, and gears. Then, to create
the POKE series, I asked myself: “If the puppets were in an
art-factory, what would their art look like?
It’s this question that led me to the new works
offered in POKE. In moving from two to three dimensions, I was excited
to add a tactile, spatial, and somehow “real world” component
to my previous work—as though the puppets themselves had stepped
out of the paintings and created the felt-works while I was sleeping.
I haven’t been sleeping, though! I’ve been wool-gathering,
dyeing, tearing, wadding, and—yes—poking away. Through
it all, my goal has been to evoke a quality of ironic nostalgia,
a mixture of pathos and tenderness that I hope is palpable in the
softness and shabbiness of these strange shapes that seemed to will
their own way through my fingers.
Collaboration with Strangers
The new body of work, created during the Covid lock-down,
is a portion of a larger project, called Collaboration with Strangers.
The chain of people who actually and unknowingly contributed to
the work in a communal conversation include: the sheep farmers,
knitters (dead and alive), sellers on Ebay selling old mohair scarves,
sweaters and a panoply of strange or mundane items, and merchants
of art and needle felt supplies. Part of the project in the future
will be giving them credit in some concrete way.
My first memory of making art is hiding behind the
brocade sofa at my Aunt Molly's, in Cleveland, Ohio, around age
four. I would scribble on the wall there, where the
marks could not be seen, before I braided the fringe on the sofa’s
bottom. Decades later, I found myself again hiding, this time from
the Covid virus, and again making something out of these combinations
of marks and materials.
The work in the show conjoins nostalgia with
the physical reality of "women's work", itself also
a form of calming reverie. The idea came when a small needle-felted
piece fell onto a painting in progress. I’ve long been interested
in juxtaposing the unexpected, and this suddenly added a tactile,
real-world spatial component to my previous work.
The pieces expand on the conflict between reverie
and illusion on the one hand, and radical material reality on the
other, where the substance of the real world often spills out
of a work and reaches toward the viewer.
Also woven into the work is another aspect of the
pandemic lockdown: the continuous arrival of fearful news –
of the disease itself, of escalating climate change, of the struggle
for racial justice. This surrounding reality entangled itself
into the work as an orange colored, eerie sky caused by the fires
and fog on September 9, 2020, as the Hungarian vintage shovel for
bailing water out of a leaking boat, and as the reimagined wacky
map in a “socially distanced” classroom. The work
alludes to the possible solutions to our calamities that will be
a larger, global collaboration with strangers.
Unlikely Companions
My current work both abandons and embraces premises
of the two previous series shown in the last six years - (There
Was Once A World and Sympathetic Criminals) - which took for inspiration
a perplexed puppet named Lorelei. The puppet, her family, and
her compadres in industrial dioramas formed a traditional still
life set up. In much of this work, the process of painting was reactionary,
old fashioned, reviving the old masters’ techniques. Observation
and a constrained set of steps – an underpainting, thin glazes
- were key.
Initially, in the current work, my usual small scale
wooden panels became even smaller to deal with larger, lofty themes
like mortality, creating an irony and ambivalent spatial relationships
reigned.
But, consciously, I wanted to find a woman’s
narrative story as a basis and I settled on the 1911 Manhattan Triangle
Factory Fire (where 146 immigrant women died.) I bought a very old
bellows, drawn by the way it operated, feeding the fire with air.
The bellow’s rounded petal and angular shapes (similar in some
ways to misshapen Lorelei) were what I loved. But, rather than doing
a painting of the object, my impulse was to pull the actual bellows
apart. But, it couldn’t be put be put back together again.
The individual shapes united and reunited forming a sort of hybrid
form that felt both familiar and mysterious, balanced and imbalanced.
More bellows followed.
Instead of technical constraints serving as a guide
and only using oil paint on panel, multiple techniques and materials
accrued to these hybrid sculptures: Odd bedfellows -cast concrete
and homespun fabric, wood and wool, bound physically to each other
and reacted together unexpectedly. They formed a kind of old world
symbiosis where the materials hold memory.
As my painting was no longer based on observation,
each one could be described as a fragment or a footnote to something
once there and then gone, with one foot in our reality and the other
in the other world. Oddly, in some sense one could imagine the painting
spawning, the hybrid sculptures; or the objects escaping their trap
spilling into actual space --- Some of the paintings and objects
coupled off creating a third meaning, sometimes they changed partners.
Finally, this body of work strives to be inclusive
on many levels, in subject, process, materials, and in person.
Minor Characters and Sympathetic Criminals
My current body of work continues the themes of “There
for but the grace of God go I” and “the meek shall inherit
the earth” that was begun in There Was Once a World.
But now the main character, a puppet named Lorelei,
is just one among the many strugglers depicted, - among weavers,
workers, pickpockets, policemen, idlers, and occupiers. Lorelei
and the others are pinned into their architecture, their circumstances
figuratively and literally. They get by, though barely, in some
mysterious space where narrative and abstraction meet. Sometimes
the architecture looms over them like a reminding metaphor or becomes
the character itself.
Still employing the traditional old master oil painting
techniques that were present in the
previous work, the color palette has now lowered and deepened a
few octaves, with more attention to color interaction. The process
involves establishing a form, then seeking out
the actual concrete piece in the world. This series can be seen
as reflecting a more solemn time, both publicaly and personally.
I plan to expand on my previous themes of characters
at work, to create a series of paintings of both the energy of work
and the sad idleness of empty architecture. I will continue using
puppets for stand-ins, bulding sets for metaphoric architecture
to use as triggers. Combining old master techniques but with ramshackle
content I will try to re-invent notion of Still and Not So Still
Lives from the characters in the studio warehouse complex called
the Giant Trade Center in San Pablo and have it open as an off-site
exhibition.
There Was Once a World
The central characters I use in my small paintings
are based on a Lorelei, a Japanese puppet I bought at a flea market
and her French puppet husband. Later, I bought their child on eBay
-- a diminutive creature with the same spout mouth. The completed
family became a metaphorical tool I use to stage allegorical human
stories. The characters’ imaginary settings include pastoral
landscapes and industrial sites constructed from combinations of
old junkyard machinery parts, photographs and stills from You Tube
factory videos.
Simultaneously old-fashioned and contemporary, naive
and sophisticated, my content and painting style are intentionally
at odds. Rejecting certain aspects of Modern Art and Post Modernism,
the expressive brushwork of Abstract Expressionism and a focus on
surface over illusion for example, I’ve purposefully painted
in an earnest, restrained and understated way. Deliberately, I’ve
resurrected some Old Master’s academic techniques which include
thin layers of delicate glazes and body color over a black and white
grisaille, chiaroscuro (though off-kilter) atmospheric perspective,
and in some, a modified Flemish palette. Thus, in both content and
technique I am striving to combine the folksy and the classical.
Part puppet/part human, Lorelei could be every peasant,
immigrant, orphan or artist in every sweatshop, factory, studio,
or day job, in Poland, or Russia, or an industrial city like Cleveland,
my hometown, in its faded glory of down-trodden industrial buildings
full of pipes and machines, the uses of which are mysterious. Lorelei
is my metaphor for perplexity, paradox and a woman’s predicament.
In context, she symbolizes the conflict between reverie and creativity
on the one hand, and secular practicality, the tasks and work of
this world on the other.
Themes of “there for but the grace of God go
I” and “the meek shall inherit the earth” are underpinning
of this series. But the primary goals are to create an ironic nostalgia
and reinstate genuine pathos and tenderness.
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