— Paintings, Poems and Assemblages —
at Artspace
201 E. Davie St. Raleigh, NC 27601
March – May 2016
These works are my “rearview mirror” observations…a looking back while moving forward. I picked up oil painting again after years of producing drawings and more recently assemblages. This act of seriously painting feels new and strange to me. The iconography that emerged was also vaguely familiar yet alien. Imaginary creatures appeared; cherries and furry things kept making their way back onto each canvas. The paintings brought back memories of roaming the Salvador Dali and the Faberge Egg collections that were once housed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art where I spent hours as a kid. I revisited my collection of bones I collected as a child from the fields and woods of my grandfather’s land.
While working on these Fur Ball paintings I was also re-exploring 20 century art and discovered correlations between what I was painting and certain images I love in the art world. The little poems in boxes are nods to these artists. Images and thoughts and stories I had filed away bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness as I painted and wrote. Putting the poems on cherry jars seemed like an appropriate play to pop art. Lit they became like Dali’s jewels, placed in boxes like Joseph Cornell’s. Take them as humorous shrines.
The paintings are humorous as well and at times unsettling in the exact way I feel handling color. They are a bit raw and garish but I like that about them. They speak to that raw child that felt the call to explore the dark places under rocks and trees and was not afraid of the land or the strangely silent galleries of the Dali Jewels that moved with tiny mechanisms and seemed to breath with life.
see also: http://artspacenc.org/