Artist’s Statement

“The inside and the outside: the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside. Because it is a virtuality that never stops dividing itself, the line of inflection is actualized in the soul but realized in matter each one on its own side. Such is the baroque trait: an exterior always on the outside, and interior always on the inside. An infinite ‘receptivity,’ an infinite ‘spontaneity.'”

– Gilles Deleuze, The Fold

My recent drapery paintings reweave Deleuze’s ideas of internal versus external and virtual verses actual. The work contains fabric images painted from unfolded draperies filled with wrinkles, metaphorically suggesting “skins.” I have used the pieces of cloth serially as still life objects in previous paintings (to allude to draped figures in Renaissance paintings) where I twisted, tied, and pinned them into postures, after which I unbound them, folded them for storage, and later unfolded and used them differently for new paintings. The draperies reappear and evolve, embodying new ideas with each reuse.

Painted with oils on shaped wood panels, the diptychs Relativity Veil 1, 2, & 3 and the triptych Veil/Frame/Void read differently as the viewer moves closer to surface details containing information often to the level of the threads in the fabric or the grain in the wood, illusionistic but at the same time painterly. The compositional arrangement of the work alludes to Josef Albers’ color problems where a patch or strip of color (in this case, exposed or faux wood grain) appears on a larger field of color. The patch of color looks dramatically or subtly different, depending on or relative to what color surrounds it. The exposed or faux wood grain reveals or plays at revealing the substrate but also serves as a rupture or aporia between the painted drapery text, painting as text, and the object-ness of the wooden structure. Mimesis plays with nature, the ply of the wood. The painted drapery lies within the Western painting tradition of illusion, but the simplicity of the compositional arrangement plays with the intension of minimalist monochrome painting: to become an icon of the absolute (a color “field”).

Veil/Frame/Void specifically reworks Derrida’s ideas about the in-between in painting—the passe-partout, which divides but at the same times passes though everything—and about the frame. The fabric in the left painting frames a rectangle of wood grain; the right painting’s illusionistically rendered drapery creates a window to a trompe l’oeil of wood grain. The painting in the middle of the triptych takes the “history” of the fabric in another but related direction. The fabric of the paintings implies “skin.” Together the three paintings present several “views”: the actual substrate of the painting (nature), an illusion of a substrate, and in the center painting a void. Through an internal mirroring or mise en abyme, these views present “undecidable” options among a series of determinate constructions. Each painting simultaneously reveals and conceals.

Summation’s Unveiling, the final panel painting in the Relativity Veil Series, uses fabric that had a history in my work and alludes to art history. I used two of those lengths of fabric as bed sheets. They are “embedded” with a new set of wrinkles. They eventually intertwined and became “props” for another set of paintings. Their entangled history physically and metaphorically binds self with other. The first panel of the triptych is a drapery that uses warm grey as the shadow color and white as the highlight color. The last panel uses warm grey as the highlight color and black as the shadow color. Chiaroscuro both reveals and conceals image and content. Between the first and last panel is a full range of value: black/white, yin/yang, beginning/end. Between the two end panels is a panel of wood grain. The center panel reveals the substrate and represents an empty field full of endless possibilities, yet as one looks more closely, the painted panel discloses another trompe l’oeil.