Text/ures
In Text/ures, I strive to blur the lines between painting and writing, exploring the gray areas and juxtapositions of painted gesture, and spelled out words.
As with the Lights and Shadows series, these paintings are based upon rhythmic paint strokes that span the entire canvas. Given these highly repetitive movements, executed with thin brushes, their appearance is often “writing-like.” You can think of it as abstract script. Reversely, I mix in paper fragments with words printed on them, but do not cut them cleanly as to easily reveal their actual meaning. For the viewer, the result is a collage of partially readable text, some of it painted, some of it added in, that forms a multi-dimensional viewing experience.
Are these paintings or writings? And beyond the question of provenance, how do these elements pair up to form a meaning?
In my mind, these works are abstract pieces of art where the interpretation evoked is both, visual and textual. They live in a space where the viewer is invited to take a close look at the painting’s color, surface texture and gesture, and relate that to any words that may be distinguishable. One viewer, looking at Textual Flows, stated that this particular piece looked like a collection of social media posts floating through cyberspace. She went on to say that the painting derided the over-use of short form content today, and its potential for disingenuous use through simplification and distortion.