I emptied a closet last week and found this painting I made in grad school (SVA) 20 years ago.
I remember making it. It was like nothing else I was working on. It was a piece I worked on kind of in secret. And when it was done, I cried. It was all there. And it made no sense.
I was working on different issues at the time, which are still in my work: transparency, layers, color as physical object, pop culture. I did a series of Wonder Woman in several layers of plexiglass so that when 4 sheets of plexi hung from the ceiling, the image became 3 dimensional and the colors related to each other differently as the viewer moved.
In this piece… the blue grid creates a ground, a barrier for things to exist in front of or behind. The viewer is on one side, and the painting exists on the other. The paint drips, but not according to gravity. The paint exists more like a physical object in space. And the colors zing. They have energy because of their relationship with each other. The orange is so powerful it refuses to stay in the background. The red feels like it exists behind the orange, but it is on top, yet smushed by the blue grid. As much as the drops are organic, there is a logic to them - three bands are horizonal. And the blue or the grid intrigues me. It was clearly on top, and structured the painting, yet visually, it falls behind the orange. There is organic drips and the grid that contains them. Each grid creates a square which is a unit of the larger piece, and can be contemplated as a unit.
The work reminds me of how I loved to look at slides as a biology major. When looking through a microscope, there is the light coming right at you, there is no top or bottom, but there is a logic to what is seen. Once a piece is labeled, it can be seen as separate, studied on its own in relation to other slides. And the grid is how we divide up the natural world to organize it, control it, study it.
What excited me about finding this piece again was how all the ideas were there. I am always working on the same ideas. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don’t.
Now I do work on blue construction netting. The netting is a powerful part of the final piece: it creates the boundary of where the art exists, yet it disappears. Currently, the image is woven onto the netting and exisits on the same plane. I think of each of the stitches much like each block in the painting. Each stitch has meaning only in relation to the other stitches around it. The meaning is created by the entirety of all the stitches, yet each stitch is integral to the whole.
And now I am exploring color in a more intentional way. Each piece is an exploration of a named color. In the painting, the colors have tension and energy. The idea of organic and inorganic.
I did not go any further in making anything like this. I did not explore any more. Yet I knew it was all in this piece - and I kept it to be uncovered 20 years later.
grid2020, 48 x 36”, oil on linen. IT WAS ALL THERE.