2020 | Painting as I sheltered
Early in 2020, I moved the furniture out of our living room, and made it my studio. I decided that drawing and painting would be easy to do in that space, plus I had the materials I needed to begin.
As a source of inspiration, I looked to several small paintings that I had made in 2019 during a dance rehearsal at the Salina Theater. I liked the fluidity of the paintings, and their emphasis on gesture. They were made quickly in real time as the dancers moved, and they had an unfinished, raw quality.
To recreate the feeling of the dancer’s movements and their costumes in motion, I directed a fan towards cloth that I had attached to the ceiling. Then I painted while it moved.
I knew from painting the dancers that exercising my memory or recall of the forms, gestures, and lines would be important. As I painted in my living room, I used memory to respond to the blowing cloth. It was interesting that the cloth seemed to find its way back to similar positions and movements. Not unlike the dancers in the theater.
One component to the paintings is the fact that each type of fabric behaves differently, and each has the potential to carry significant content. For instance, silk or satin holds conceptual ideas very different than that of cotton. Like the vision imagined by a choreographer or costume designer, I chose fabrics that carried my imagined narrative. An imagined dance.
Perhaps the choice to paint the movement of cloth was a response to the instability that I felt as the pandemic spread throughout the world. My family and I were among those who had plenty and did not suffer. However, the stress was undeniable. Painting fabric as it moved held my attention, and gave me a positive, meaningful focus in the midst of great uncertainty.