Random Pastoral Aerials

Random Pastoral Aerial #3: Flows and fissures
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

Random Pastoral Aerial #4: Pools and micro-climates
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

These aerial paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint (in this case, agricultural) on the landscape. Like most of my work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. The aerials would be the mapped view. The ideas were nuanced by personal experiences (moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles) and the loss of my imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This way of working was very deliberate and opened the pieces up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.

Decay Under a Bright Blue Sky / Homage to Fall

Decay under a bright blue sky / Homage to Fall
mixed-media on panel
2006
17" x 35"

This humble and poetic little piece is one of my favorite landscapes. It's part of a series I call The Perfect Fall.

I used a process similar to some of the dimensional aerial paintings where I draped panels with wood and paper. Here I draped vellum over wood panel and used pencil to make rubbings over the textured surface, which gave birth to the tree-like forms. Then I painted the sky with cerulean blue acrylic paint. The flatness of the blue paint offers a watery, sinking and sliding contrast to the spiked and desiccated wood forms below.

Landscape Action #3: The Perfect Fall

The Perfect Fall: After peak and on to loss

I photographed this Landscape Action in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee when I was living in that region. It is part of two other overlapping series: The Perfect Fall and Tourism and Tragedy

Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground

Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground
canvas, dye, fabric paint, wax, chalk
2006
3' x 4'

I dyed a mottled ground on raw canvas, then applied a beeswax resist by rubbing pebbled pavement and painting with a brush. I redyed it several times, removed the wax and brought out more definition with fabric paints. I chose fabric paints so the canvas would remain soft and pliable. I wanted the paint to meld with the fibers (as in dyeing processes) rather than just sit on top of them like a traditional painting.

Finally, I drew a chalk outline where the shadow of a figure is suggested and photographed it outside on the ground. Something intrigues me about returning art to a site of inspiration like this and then (re)photographing.

I use the word 'rephotographing' because this piece was inspired by photographs I took in the Smoky Mountains for the "Landscape Action," The Perfect Fall: After peak and on to loss. The Perfect Fall series overlaps with another series I call Tourism and Tragedy. The Ana Mendieta piece is a part of both series.

Hairshirt / Wandering in the Desert

Hairshirt / Wandering in the desert
artist's hair, wig hair, tulle and thread
2006
2' x 2'

The back of the shirt is part drawing and part painting. I've swirled locks of my own hair between 2 layers of tulle and hand-stitched them together with meandering lines. I was thinking intuitively of aerials, maps and wandering, but also of suffering, femininity, notions of beauty and living in the desert.

9 Walks from Memory

Memory Walks
hand-dyed cotton yarn on raw canvas
2004
10" x 12"

Each of these small canvases are a stitched memory of different walks on the same route. The walks were a part of my and Frank's (my marriage partner's) nightly routine when we would stroll the same familiar route through the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Xs mark the beginning and ending points of each stroll, which physically began and ended at the same point but, in memory, never quite match up as they are re-walked / re-membered through stitches. Each memory is different in emphasis... what with how, in recollection, I might linger on some stretches of road a bit longer or shorter amount of time or accentuate the twists and turns of the streets at slightly different angles.

Sometimes the actual walks included an extra loop around a connecting street (depending on the evening and my and Franks's energy level or interest). This accounts for some of the stitched memories including an extra little loop in the stitching while others do not.

In doing this mapping project, I was drawing a connection between sequential, time-based activities (walking, stitching, remembering, narrating) and spatial, mapped imagery, which are usually static. I was also marking evidence of how repetition, reimagining or re-telling of a story, even in stitches, ingrains a pattern and molds the map (over time) into a more idealized (or nostalgic) form of the "original" territory while still allowing for idiosyncratic differences between each repetition.

L.A. Mirages

L.A. Mirage 01

L.A. Mirage 02

L.A. Mirage 03

L.A. Mirage 04

L.A. Mirage 05

L.A. Mirage 06

L.A.Mirage 07

These images were created by rearranging a set of 10 landscape photos that I took around our Los Angeles neighborhood. I then rearranged the photos in multiple configurations of 4. In making these pieces, I was thinking of the Los Angeles movie industry and the city’s illusive water supply.

I showed the L.A. Mirage series during an open studio along with two videos:
L.A. Trees #1: Palm & Sunset (Paradise / Apocalypse)
L.A. Trees #2: Topiary (Plato’s Tree)