It Changes Everything-- Postcard Series

I've developed the habit of using the edge of a postcard as a guide when painting. Almost as much paint ends up on the cards as on the painting itself. As they become soggy, I set them aside to dry, and then reuse. In 2009, I began exclusively using postcards from a box- full leftover from a  group show, It Changes Everything, I was in that year.

After a while, my studio became littered with the cards, and I started to appreciate how all the paint build- up interacted with the color and text. Tacking them to the wall, one after the other, the phrase It Changes Everything was altered in each. Splatters and stains of paint obscured some or all of the title, and sometimes cover the entire surface.

The postcards have morphed from tools, to hybrid tool-as-art and an on-going modular project tracking a near-daily practice of painting.

           

* It Changes Everything was exhibited at Kingston Gallery in Boston in January, 2009.

Painter Sue Post designed the postcard and organized the show, which also included work by Kirstin Lamb, Antoinette Winters, and Hannah Bureau.

Trippy: Of Studio Time and Dehydration Headaches

I've been sitting in my studio on day two of a dehydration headache, which maybe I should credit-- in the way they say insight can be had during fevers or sweat lodge visits-- with allowing me to see the central axis, or cross form, which shows up super-consistently in my work. I had never noticed it so clearly before. The horizontal axis is formed both by the house imagery and the stripes  used to suggest sky and earth. The tree form, particularly where it intersects with the house, creates the vertical axis to create the cross.

I often employ a sort of  "superstructure" within which I paint these images. Frequently I've used a sort of bubble- X form (see below).

 It occurs to me that it's another an kind of cross.