Art notes on:

Still Time

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This 2019 series of paintings and cut-paper collages aims to still time, to slow it down, and to celebrate an older-fashioned way of life. I modeled the series after antique folk tapestries, both in purpose and aesthetic.

Centuries ago, folk tapestries were made for the purpose of sharing historical narratives to help a group of people remember their past. Folk art has always been “for the people, by the people,” and my Still Time series invites you to sit down and listen to long-told stories about community, connection to the land, and patient cultivation. The art shares snapshots of this earlier era, when daily life for many people included harvesting the tomatoes, enjoying an idle hour by the pond, or tapping the sugar bush to collect sap for maple syrup.

The Still Time paintings and collages also mimic folk tapestries’ visual aesthetic. The composition is rambling and imprecise, the perspective flattened, the realism stripped down, and the color playful. The delicate relationships between the hues mimic an antique textile’s murky, worn surface, its imagery becoming hazier with age.

In order to achieve this haziness while still telling a rich color story, I determined to use a palette of colors that had extremely low contrast (lights and darks) but very high chroma (color saturation). As a result, there is extremely little variation between any light areas and dark areas within one piece. Snap a photo of the artwork in black and white, and it will look nearly like a singular, monotonous wash of gray paint. Because of such subtle differences in the tonal values, the works in the Still Time collection are full of forms that vibrate and hum shoulder to shoulder, playing a game with the viewer’s eyes as she tries to make sense of the hues before her.

“beach access closed” collage processed in black and white:

The idea to include a small collection of cut-paper collages in the Still Time series originated from an unusual step in my painting process. When I am creating a painting, there is usually a point where I get a little bit stuck and I'm not sure what to do next. To break my creative block, I'll take a photo of the painting in progress, upload the image to Photoshop, and then digitally cut, paste, and rearrange areas of the subject until I land on a composition that visually satisfies me. This digital sketch then serves as a visual guide when I move back to my easel to continue on the painting. Because I enjoy the organic and creative play of moving shapes around before I determine a final composition, I thought that this technique could translate with ease into the realm of collages created from cut-paper. The collages are an analog interpretation of one of my tried and true digital tricks.