After working for a decade with non-traditional materials I have returned to painting with oils on stretched canvas. This switch led to a breakthrough--I developed a formal structure that seems (at least for now) to have unlimited possibilities. Inspired by the memory of place rather than landscape per se, and also by precursors (Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Per Kirkeby), these large oil paintings allow me to marry gesture and drawing, giving equal weight to both, darkness and light, abstracted landscapes and emotional expressivity.
I'm still making paintings in old wall sample books and on found bed sheets and table cloths. I still make stitched painting at times — using remnants and fragments from my looser, more gestural abstraction paintings— often landscape inspired recto-verso paintings, but these days I'm making more direct works on canvas. In many ways, I have moved away from paintings structured by pattern, and found myself drawn to more complexity, a greater number of parts, a more relational language. I still rely on, and reuse found fabrics in my textile projects (bedsheets, duvets, crochets, 1960-70s women’s business jackets, all scavenged from thrift stores), but in these “post-pattern” paintings, it’s no longer about regularly repeating motifs. I still value Pattern and Decoration; and Support/Surface—Alberto Burri, Simon Hantai—but I’ve also been looking at Vuillard, Bonnard, Mitchell, Twombly and Rauschenberg, and reconnecting with 1950s Ab Ex and Informel painting. The process of making these paintings is much slower, which I hope translates into longer looking.