I obsess over painting the illusion of wrinkled fabric. My process reflects the intersection of ideas of language, postmodern philosophy, and string theory. Focusing on details such as wrinkles in fabric both feeds and resists chaos. Recording details in a painting becomes a way to understand fabric as a fluid visual structure and conceptual entity that can move in infinite directions.
My current series of Veil Paintings stems from previous investigations that have featured drapery as a primary component. They contain fabric images painted from folded draperies filled with wrinkles, metaphorical “skins.” I use a cotton scarf as a still-life object (on which I crease a grid full of wrinkles) for painting. I launder and re-use the still-life scarf, giving it new folds and wrinkles for the next painting in the series. The final artworks are illusionistic paintings of wrinkled scarves on flat, gessoed scarves.
Veil Paintings reweave Deleuze’s ideas from The Fold. Instead of rigid frameworks of reason and logic, Deleuze’s “folding” permits a different kind of perception and creativity, knowledge stemming from affirmative desire to make. Folds as thoughts move infinitely and in all directions. Deleuze used the term rhizome or rhizomatic to describe ideas with many “non-hierarchical entry and exit points,” allowing re-presentation and re-interpretation. The wrinkled fabric that I paint from provides visual data, and the painting mimetically interprets the data.
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I obsess over painting the illusion of wrinkled fabric. My process reflects the intersection of ideas of language, postmodern philosophy, and string theory. Focusing on details such as wrinkles in fabric both feeds and resists chaos. Recording details in a painting becomes a way to understand fabric as a fluid visual structure and conceptual entity that can move in infinite directions.
My current series of Veil Paintings stems from previous investigations that have featured drapery as a primary component. They contain fabric images painted from folded draperies filled with wrinkles, metaphorical “skins.” I use a cotton scarf as a still-life object (on which I crease a grid full of wrinkles) for painting. I launder and re-use the still-life scarf, giving it new folds and wrinkles for the next painting in the series. The final artworks are illusionistic paintings of wrinkled scarves on flat, gessoed scarves.
Veil Paintings reweave Deleuze’s ideas from The Fold. Instead of rigid frameworks of reason and logic, Deleuze’s “folding” permits a different kind of perception and creativity, knowledge stemming from affirmative desire to make. Folds as thoughts move infinitely and in all directions. Deleuze used the term rhizome or rhizomatic to describe ideas with many “non-hierarchical entry and exit points,” allowing re-presentation and re-interpretation. The wrinkled fabric that I paint from provides visual data, and the painting mimetically interprets the data.
Each painting recapitulates the topography of the still-life fabric. The wrinkles and folds in each scarf are literally brought to light through the use of strong directional lighting: the threads in the folds and wrinkles are revealed and concealed as they move through light and dark spaces. Conceptually similar to models of “branes” or superstrings in quantum mechanics, the Veil Paintings become thresholds to theoretical spaces through which threads or strings of ideas travel. The wrinkled fabric places the viewer in between spaces, shifting between interpretive spaces that call to mind alternative realities of different readings.
Language plays an important part in developing ideas for my work. Noam Chomsky’s theory of Transformational/Generative Grammar considers deep structure and surface structure that can be mapped with tree diagrams—a way to look at levels of interpretation for painting series. Before painting, I conceptualize each series with words and then find a title that describes a theme the set explores (deep structure). Next, I use words to clarify each painting in the series to coalesce specific images and ideas (surface structure). The titles help to refine individual images, whole compositions, and series. The rhizomatic process of painting then redirects the outcome for each painting and adjusts its title. The painting titles in this series are partly interchangeable because the differences between each painting are subtle and somewhat open-ended: intricate iterations of making, reciprocity of the fold, materializing glyphs, and complex threads of thought.
My fascination with painting wrinkled fabric also compares to visual play with graphemes or glyphs. Graphemes are the smallest unit (letters, characters, individual symbols) of a writing system, and glyphs are individual marks that collectively add up to make a grapheme. I begin painting wrinkled fabric by using a larger brush to map in the overall typography of the fabric, and then I break it down into smaller and smaller units, using smaller brushes, until a “0” brush applies many tiny interconnecting lines that depict the threads or strings composing the fabric (glyphs becoming graphemes becoming images). The tiny brush strokes of paint act as syntactic glyphs that materialize to create or shatter images or illusions.
As artists we engage in a reciprocal fabric of making. We tie and re-tie “strings” that simultaneously pull on the past, present, and future, on the artist and the viewer. For me, this process includes my vested interest in each image I paint and in the idea of fabric as a fluid visual and conceptual entity infinitely wrinkling, veiling, folding, unfolding, and enfolding. Painted glyphs move from chaotic beginnings of uncertainty toward organization and meaning: a repetition of expansion and contraction that opens or disappears to form complex webs of making for the artist and of meaning for the viewer.
