Seeing Through

Since my work started to focus on gesture as both catalyst and metaphor for changing your mind, I’ve struggled with the reality that gesture is, in fact, a movement. And as movement, a gesture travels over space and time. X , Y, Z axis + time. We’re talking about four dimensions and as a painter, I work in only two.

One of the ways I’ve navigated this conundrum is to layer my work, each overlay a different time and/or space. But in order to acknowledge a before and then a later strata, those initial layers must be seeable. This requires transparency.

Today I realized that transparency might be what I’m grappling with here whilst in residency at Monson Arts.

And by now, at this two thirds point of the residency,  I've come at transparency from several different angles.

I have added medium to charcoal or chalk pastel  to manipulate and smear it thinly across a substrate. I have painted on translucent Yupo  and Mylar layered on top of a pre-existing image. I have wiped  away with damp rags, erasers, and thin, anemic layers of gesso to leave palimpsests of first images. In collaborating with a coresident, a white oil stick was used on top of white gessoed birch panel, revealing the marks only in a certain light. I have hidden appropriated imagery from art history under a layer of Mylar, fully painted the piece and then excavated the image with an X-Acto knife only when the painting was deemed finished.

Maintaining transparency in art making, as in relationships, proves to be a worthy struggle.