Flat / Curve, suite of 6
Split /Merge, suite of 5
space is not flat, but curved….
~ Carlo Rovelli
These prints do not have imagery. The intaglio plates are not images of the rock used to make them or fields or particular shapes. Instead, they are non-referential, non-derivative shapes to work with. These suites are from a process of exploring and working that brought a kind of freedom from having to say anything or from the work having to mean something. In this way, looking, drawing, printing – the studio work – became for a time a pure contemplative practice of shape, space, color, value, composition and material…
There are two series here… made during a period of time when I was doing some ‘income work’ that wasn’t related to art practice. It was work that took a lot of energy, time, and focus. During this time, the work I had always done – a sort of call and response to poetry, literature, the natural world – seemed to be at an ebb… perhaps because that work requires something that felt sidelined, paused, slightly out of reach at the time… I don’t know exactly. I just recall the sense of what I think of as ‘pure-form response’. It is something that is always there in my work anyway because of the training I have had.
I had been to see Morandi’s work in Italy. Even though there is still life there, it is really form. After that trip, I think is when shapes of things came to the fore in my line of sight so to speak.. again I don’t know, these things are difficult to explain. It just suddenly felt resonant to make these images that were not about anything, but still had relationship between them, color/value dialogue, serial, interrelated.
I made the two suites of prints over a summer after having made a similar suite titled Angular Momentum (on the Principles of Physics page) a year or so prior. I have to confess to really loving these prints … they were hard work, but I loved making them, and thinking about them, and solving their problems. I love the way the ink looks on- and slightly in – the paper. I think they are humorous somehow, a bit playful, winking at artists’ work I also love like Ellsworth Kelly, Giorgio Morandi, Richard Serra… the brain of Carlo Rovelli…
for these reasons, I selected these suites for my first blog post on the new website.
I hope you enjoy !