Energized and inspired by
last week's interview with Sherrill Kahn and the peek we were given at her new work, Monday morning found me setting up the wet studio for some marathon fabric painting. I used to spend days and days doing this- mostly on paper and wood- and I have missed it a lot, lately.
While this may look like a total mess, it's actually lightning in a bottle. Arranged on the table within reach are many different kinds of paints- Lumiere, Neopaque, Jacquard Textile paints, Dye-Na-Flow and even some of my dwindling supply of Sherrill's Sorbets- a bunch of hand-made stamps, sponges, brushes, paint palettes, water and all kinds of painting grounds from white fabric to pre-painted papers. Plus, of course, coffee- lots of coffee.
Using techniques demo'd in Sherrill's video, I reacquainted myself with the joys of painting with abandon. All of the pieces I painted ranged in size from about 28"x18" to 8"x11". No ground safe, no technique untried, nothing was "finished" until it screamed at me to stop. Here's what I've created so far.
(cotton fabric)
(artists' canvas... this one is my favorite)
(cotton fabric)
(cotton fabric, taken from the piece above and slathered with Lumiere)
(cotton fabric)
(watercolor paper)
(heavy interfacing)
(copy paper)
(watercolor paper)
No idea what these beauties will be used for, and there are more in progress on the table, waiting for another painting session tomorrow.
Happy creating!
Models: Ming Xi (Ford), Emma Xie Fei Yun (Elite Paris), Emma Pei (IMG), Du Juan (IMG), Bonnie Chen (Next), Danni Li (Elite), Jiang Xiao Yi (Silent), Sun FeiFei (Women), Shu Pei (Next), Liu Wen (Marilyn) & Sonny Zhou (IMG)
Model: Lakshmi Menon (Supreme)
Model: Hyun Yi Lee (Major)
Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.
Model: Liu Wen (Marilyn)
Model: Danni Li (Elite)
Model: Sun FeiFei (Women)
