Prints
“Design for Life” and “Dislocation” are a suite of two screen prints, which represent the cycles of creation and transformation, morphogenesis finding its vocabulary in an arena of anticipation. As an abstract painter in a time of disenchantment and a world represented through photography, I am particularly interested in the concept of beauty as redemptive, heroic, and mediated through nature rather than culture.
The prints were created by digitally isolating various visual elements of my painted work. These elements here become building blocks, dislocated from their original context, broken down, and digitally photographed, mimicking the painting’s process through a kind of spontaneous bricolage. In this way, the spirit of my painting has maintained its integrity in print.
Not Forgotten 1 and 2: Windows, saturated with metaphors of providing views of the world, have been a recurring theme in art of the last century—from René Magritte’s surrealist images to Gerhard Richter’s Shadow Paintings, softened takes on the modernist grid. Robert Delaunay’s series Windows on the City illuminate the ways in which his home, Paris, was changing. As a New Yorker, my windows are charged with associations: among them, an infamous policing strategy and a city recovering from 2012’s destructive Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, in the latter case, my windows could be almost anywhere, as natural disasters are occurring globally at an alarming rate.
For me, however, these works don’t necessarily evoke doom. Just as windows are thresholds between two worlds, these prints reflect, in a critical moment, on the nature of reality and illusion, inevitability and potential. The idea of a broken window is also an invitation for some sort of renewal. A window can be fixed, new histories can be made.
In “Design for Life,” I have made four discreet layers of these fractal-like elements (cross-sections of pieces of my paintings) by hand drawing and color separating them from the photographs. The layers were then collaged one on top of the other, sometimes concealing areas of previous layers, giving the final image real depth, albeit shallow, as opposed to illusory space. Each layer consists of 8 color separations, and a final background pattern in soft white drawn from the combined shapes of the original elements, make up a total of 33 colors.
In “Dislocation,” ghosts of those same “building blocks” before they were sliced up, fall from the sky, subject to the laws of nature, and end up in a heap of colored shapes and forms at the base. The narrative reveals nothing of their origins. They are nevertheless hand made forms that look like they have had a purpose, and their journey is a way of re-ordering their potential in the visual world. Similarly drawn by hand and color separated, this print is also made up of four discreet layers of 8 colors each, plus a white background.
I’ve chosen transparent inks, printed on Chartham Natural Translucent vellum, to give the pictures a kind of otherworldly luminosity not traditionally seen in screen prints on paper. They are in an edition of 42 each, and published by Durham Press.