Cat Tails

STATEMENT

Woven paper constructions use paper, that is flat, common, ubiquitous, as a surface for ink, paint, pencil and bare expositions of paper itself, a celebration of the richness of this simple material. I seek out papers from around the world as my palette for color, texture, weight, and workabilty. Will it fold, crease, and cut, will it pull ink in or hold it on the surface? How can the two sides interact, front and back, together? This suite provides visual mosaics of tactile sensual information, a cool medium, with room for us to engage, like poetry or jazz. A line traces moments, follows contours and reveals echoes of the world. A stroke, outline, division, a line records words, sounds, ideas. A line is a statement, a record, a word, a sound, with context and intent. And a line can be an edge, an embossed trace, a cut. Shapes are icons and glyphs, and we read them as symbols, conciously and unconsiously, and assign meaning to them. I work to simplify and discover how shape evolves and how we understand them. I am working in the realm of visual metaphor. There is no illustration, no reference to the world other than the things themselves. The visuals are self-referental, not analogs of reality. I work with what the eye reads in pattern, converging and diverging lines and shapes, with the delight of texture and material. I have been exploring visual geometric fields for many years. Originally as pen and ink drawings, then as simple embossed lines, finally cutting through, and then weaving the page. The front and back of the constructions are usually worked simultaneously. I use of a wide variety of papers, paints, inks, and drawing media. The shapes grow out of the material, and are formed into iconic glyphs. Influences: prints and drawings with fine lines and textures, such as the drama, depth and darkness and light in Rembrandt etchings. Also I look to Japanese block prints and scrolls and screens with shallow space and flat colors, and the implication of deep, continual distances. I enjoy the sequential visual quilts of our modern illuminated pages: comic book art. Here the page geometry is laid out to control time, viewpoint, direction and comprehension. Another touch point, the paintings of color fields, color on color such as the art of Gustave Klimt, who sometimes hints at natural seeming visual space and then contradicts those hints with flat patterns and reflecting gold. More influences include the still, calm studies of the impossible geometry of Josef Albers prints, the contradictory, delightful visual space of Al Held paintings, the jarring, eye manipulations of Bridget Riley op art, the constructed shapes of Frank Stella. I am exploring the surfaces of materials and the significance of darkness, shallow space and suggestions of deep space, star tracks, comet trails, the patterns of waves disappearing on the shore, snowfall clouds and fields, and visual music.