Artist’s Statement

Holidays Unfolding, a new evolution of my Veil Paintings series, investigates the trope of drapery and the idea of Still Life, not as Nature Morte (or “dead nature”) but a Nature Morte Vivante (vivante implying “fast moving action and a certainly lively quality”). The work also examines contradictory feelings that accompany loss, nostalgia, or ubi sunt to become a meditation on mortality and life’s transience. In this series I explore new possibilities between the interface of painting, textiles, and digital technology while producing an end product that maintains the nuance and richness of slow work wrought by hand.

The painted fabric, ellipses, and patterned fabric in the paintings act as limina or thresholds that, along with the accompanying images and forms, place the viewer into multiple, often conflicting, layers of space and meaning. In the series the Rabbit or environment may be stretched or manipulated through Photoshop to create a sense of instability, heightened emotion, or a digital sifting. The paintings good-humoredly deconstruct imagery from my own painting history, as well as from pop and high culture to create new “spaces” of meaning. The paintings also contain dark humor, visual puns, symbols and metaphors, moments of silence, art historical allusions, and spiritual conundrums.

Christmas Rising depicts ghost rabbits ascending to an unknown destination. The still life table in the foreground is draped with fabric and displays a graphic design of a Christmas tree framing an image of a decaying pear sitting in a dish on a table covered with fabric. Rising above the pear is a handkerchief moving through light and stone while green leaves dissolve into a fiery background. The framed image magnifies the primary image used to create the background pattern. The floating green sudarium contains ellipses or missing pieces. Poinsettias hover among the Rabbits, and each floating Christmas bulb contains a pixelated and mirrored reflection of the pear to question the position and solidity of the Christmas tree in space. Embroidered lines recapitulate the idea of upward movement and a sense of time and space that is both circular and unraveling. The corner Rabbit in each painting in the series silently bears witness to the unfolding narrative.

The Rabbits in Easter Falling appear as lively blue-eyed, brown, field animals that plummet through forms and spaces of the painting. The still life table with blue fabric tumbles from the top of the painting while also representing sky. The earth-like brown cloth is swiftly pulled and stretched downward. Elliptical rabbit holes complicate the sense of space, existing as hole, object, and transparent entity. The Easter lilies drop between the Rabbits while Easter eggs with rose garlands hover inside spinning orbs. The image in the ruffled frame again magnifies the background pattern that contains pink handkerchiefs moving down/out of the frame and a cluster of green grapes emitting light through stones onto another cluster of grapes placed on the surface of a partially seen glowing sphere.

Valentine’s Day Exploding presents an exploding pink still-life table suspended sideways on the right side of the painting. The soft, draped fabric on the table stretches and then explodes like glass as a result of some cataclysmic event. The framed image reveals the essence of the patterned fabric. Dying leaves rise upward behind three overly ripe pears that sit on a drapery-covered table in front of wood grain that is illuminated at the top right. Circled with symbolic light rays, one of the pears moves away from the others. The frame around the three pears comes from a Victorian Easter card to heighten the sense of nostalgia. The pink Rabbits have expressions of resignation as they are tossed around the painting and go in and out of rabbit holes. Embroidery highlights various movements within the painting including that of one Rabbit that jumps out of a hole and begins to break apart as it moves toward the explosion. Roses fly around in the explosion as well as play games of hide and seek in the drapery. Votive images of sacred, flaming hearts with crying eyes act as both stabilizing compositional elements and expressions of internalized sorrow.