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The collage/paintings on paper have resulted from placing iconographic references to a vast range of cultures and personal experience on a vertical axis. This work represents a move from the staining technique on raw canvas and an emphasis on color and the accidental to a need for formal organization and a new appreciation of symmetry. Disparate images find an unlikely amalgam in these collages where they continue to transform each other and where abstraction and representation, the accidental and the deliberate, are in delicate balance. There is something austere and meditative in these small collages and a real shift in my attempt at purification to operate without color. The weaving of multiple dimensions which, I hope, encourages multiple readings of equal value is essentially dealing with the spiritual.
At one point the exercise in restraint seems to have given way to a need to move this work to highly textured large canvases that could now incorporate color and where the sensuous and the systematic could merge. Whereas in the small collages the totemic image was worked on first and the integration of background followed, in the canvases the background is attended to first, working on the texture and successive layerings of underpaint to create light that is interior and colors that are weathered. In suggesting a notion of time eroding the surface and revealing hints of its ancient layers I am attempting to create the necessary architectural backdrop for the images on the surface which represent cultural fragments and slices of personal memory.
January, 1994
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