Artist’s Statement

Veiling Desire 1-10 explore another conceptual wrinkle in my study of drapery as image and content. Each painting in the series suggests palimpsests or pentimenti of histories. Acrylic paintings rendered from closely observed fabric (used in the Relativity Veil series and with several previous histories in my work) include one last layer of textures: in the cut piece of cloth I added a final layer of wrinkles and folds through careful ironing and creasing. The new wrinkles make up the understructure of yet another Renaissance painting.

As a series Veiling Desire 1-10 begins with an annunciation (taken from Sandro Botticelli’s The Annunciation), continues with several Madonna and Child paintings (Madonna of Chancellor Roland by Jan Van Eyck, The Senigallia Madonna by Piero della Francesca, Adoration of the Shepards, Central Panel from the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, and Madonna and Child with Saints, St. Lucy Altarpiece by Veneziano Domenico), and ends with a deposition and then resurrection. The painting, like the cloth that it mimics, contains a history of folds and wrinkles that at times merge with, submerge into, or emerge from one another. Depending on the position of the viewer with respect to the painting (either close or far), the painting reads differently. The series is painted on scarves, cloth to be worn (again referencing the body) but here presented as art objects. Each painted history and reading holds an image of desire asking something of the viewer: What does a trompe l’oeil want? What does an abstract painting want? Veiling Desire “renunciates” direct signs of desire yet pictorially seduces through each painting’s indirectness, self-deconstruction, and internal complexity. One piece in this series, Veiling Desire 9 (Deposition by Raphael Sanzio), is a painting skin (a painting made only of paint, not painted on a cloth support). The paint is liberated from the support and simultaneously deconstructs and constructs itself as an image/object of desire. The image is taken from a painting that is on the cusp of Renaissance and Baroque pictorial construction.

Veiling Desire 1-10, Veil/Frame/Void, and Relativity Veil 1, 2, & 3 challenge and play with expectations of what painting does. The product lies on the crease of representation and abstraction, nature and culture, and painting and object. It conceptualizes and dissolves boundaries between self/other, physical/metaphysical, and certainty/doubt, infinitely folding, refolding, and unfolding a fabric of interchangeability, a skin revealing another skin.