2022 – on going
« What paintings can teach us if we can really learn to see them? What happens when we look at a painting? What do we think about? What do we imagine? How can we explain, even to ourselves, what we see or think we see? » Daniel Arasse, Take a closer look, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013.
I have painted. I paint. I like to paint, but I don’t do it enough. Sometimes I am scared of showing my paintings because I haven’t formally “studied” the medium. I don’t think that it’s a valid reason. And yet I have amassed hundreds of paintings on paper, sketches, drawings. I paint on paper with oil sticks. I like to paint monochromes, I like to cover my paintings. Often I obscure the entire canvas, as if I were trying to conceal it, to hide it from view. I invariably start with red, as if red were the colour of blood, the beginning of things. And then, layer by layer, I add other colours. The red gives it depth, and the light comes after. Printing my paintings onto my weaves has for me been a way of veiling them, of camouflaging them within my weaves.
When I was twenty, I read my first art history book: Take a closer look, by Daniel Arasse. It was a revelation, introducing me to the idea that that everything about a painting can be questioned. After all, what we think we see in not necessarily what the painter wanted to show. As a weaver, I found myself drawn to this idea—I wasn’t interested in showcasing my paintings directly. Instead, I sought to present them through the medium of weaving.
By taking pictures of my paintings with a disposable camera, I deliberately produced low quality, blurred photographs. The blur, as a failed movement, has for me been a way of showing my paintings. They were already failures, so it was easier to present them on my weaves, in this altered state.
