Artist’s Statement
My drapery paintings on carved wood invoke and reinvent European canonical painting. A drapery may stand in for the body, free of specific gender connotations while still creating a human presence. The often-carved surfaces in the painting construction, along with the illusionistically painted drapery images, blend painting and sculpture, object and illusion, allowing the referents to resonate on multiple levels. I also see my paintings as texts (and often include text) offering layers of meaning to those viewers who take the time to engage them.
Historically, the dialectic of drapery and the body seeks both to reveal and conceal substance and spirit. Drapery presents or covers the body in a number of ways: as a pulled back curtain, as an item of clothing, as a banderole, or as a bed sheet. Drapery can make known the sensuality/sexuality of the body, as in Titian’s Venus of Urbino where wall draperies and bed clothing frame a naked, reclining figure. Drapery can reveal the spirituality of the body/person or event, as in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in which Saint Teresa is covered in yards of inexplicably animated fabric that becomes a visual expression of her spirituality, sensuality, and visionary experience. Drapery can also reveal as it conceals, as in Van Der Weyden’s Crucifixion: the crucified and virtually naked Christ figure in the center of the painting is covered only with a piece of drapery that serves as a loin cloth. His divinity is maintained or signified by the covering of his genitals with a cloth that extends several feet from both sides of his body and mysteriously floats in a windless sky.
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Artist’s Statement
My drapery paintings on carved wood invoke and reinvent European canonical painting. A drapery may stand in for the body, free of specific gender connotations while still creating a human presence. The often-carved surfaces in the painting construction, along with the illusionistically painted drapery images, blend painting and sculpture, object and illusion, allowing the referents to resonate on multiple levels. I also see my paintings as texts (and often include text) offering layers of meaning to those viewers who take the time to engage them.
Historically, the dialectic of drapery and the body seeks both to reveal and conceal substance and spirit. Drapery presents or covers the body in a number of ways: as a pulled back curtain, as an item of clothing, as a banderole, or as a bed sheet. Drapery can make known the sensuality/sexuality of the body, as in Titian’s Venus of Urbino where wall draperies and bed clothing frame a naked, reclining figure. Drapery can reveal the spirituality of the body/person or event, as in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in which Saint Teresa is covered in yards of inexplicably animated fabric that becomes a visual expression of her spirituality, sensuality, and visionary experience. Drapery can also reveal as it conceals, as in Van Der Weyden’s Crucifixion: the crucified and virtually naked Christ figure in the center of the painting is covered only with a piece of drapery that serves as a loin cloth. His divinity is maintained or signified by the covering of his genitals with a cloth that extends several feet from both sides of his body and mysteriously floats in a windless sky.
In my paintings, illusionistically painted drapery and fruit substitute for the body, a barrier between interiors (still life objects and references) and exteriors (landscapes, perspective lines, houses, tornadoes), or a boundary where interiors meet exteriors. The drapery embodies substance but also spirit: the point where ideas, people, cultures, and emotions cross and sometimes merge. Drapery connects dynamic with static. Drapery becomes a catalyst for exploring the conflict between belief and deed. Symbols and metaphors continually evolve and recycle in my paintings; drapery on a table top uncovers objects such as a dying potted plant, decaying pear, or tornado, objects that represent death and destruction or a death-defying force, depending on their context.
Carved, burned, and painted (with oils and encaustic) wooden surfaces create an interconnected pattern echoing nature, culture, and our spiritual, emotional and intellectual lives. The realistically painted elements serve as touchstones to the metaphor and yet provide another barrier, a trompe l’oeil, to be shattered and then reassessed. Each cognate suggests the interchange of energy between outside forces and inside forces on both physical and spiritual levels. As part of the “text” I merge my own words with those of classic and modern poets, mixing the verbal (often printed in Greek, Germanic runes, or Ogham) and the visual to intertextualize ideas common among arts and through time. I have begun to extend these metaphors and connections by including musical notation, mathematical equations, scientific diagrams, and architectural templates. For example, words and numbers shape thought, and fruits generate new life; a perspective line transforms into a diagram describing myopia while a tornado, hovering on the horizon, binds past, present, and future. These forms also contribute to the mixture of image and theme, as in the following paintings.
Song of Sorrow, Mocking Desire, and Stillness Unfolding are allusions to and revisions of the Renaissance paintings Madonna del Parto (by Piero della Francesca), The Mocking of Christ (by Fra Angelico), and The Last Supper (by Leonardo da Vinci). Song of Sorrow addresses questions of place or one’s sense of “home.” It began as a humorous challenge to make a painting that matched my living room sofa; it seeks to connect body and spirit, interior to exterior, and solitude to communion. Mocking Desire and Stillness Unfolding began as an attempt to portray allusions to and revisions of the Renaissance paintings Annunciation (by Leonardo da Vinci), Rest on the Flight into Egypt (by Adriaen Isenbrandt), Madonna del Parto (by Piero della Francesca), and The Mocking of Christ (by Fra Angelico). Detonator/Elaborator explores terms from Umberto Eco’s Sign, Symbol, Code. Eco describes the mystic as the “detonator” and the scholar as the “elaborator”, the one who recounts and culturally encodes the mystic’s visions and experiences; this painting began as a playful collaboration with a five-year-old neighbor girl. Through the course of several meetings, Senja drew pictures and words in wax crayon on the surface of the painting, to which I would respond through another layer of marks and paint. I concluded the painting with the figurative drapery image—interweaving the autobiographical with the historical, the past with the present, the self with another—exploring the metaphorical possibilities of material, process and content resulting in multivalent but fruitful outcomes.
