"Notes on Distress"
"Distress and Other Things / 32 Locations on Painting" is a suite of thirty-two paintings, each 41" x 35", oil on canvas, conceived as a cathartic antidote to my outrage over the effect of the 2016 election on the environment. I needed to find a way to channel my energies into something positive. The intention is to exhibit these paintings as an installation in a continuous space with each painting having a 4" space between them and turning corners as needed.
I came across an image of an upside down American flag (a sign of distress) and it made an immediate connection to the work I have been doing for the last dozen years. I've been painting in a horizontal motif as a response to and integration of the sedimentary landscapes of my beloved American Southwest and decorative banding I'd seen in Italian cathedrals, especially Siena, Florence and Orvieto. This motif has become a way to paint with color and less concern with composition. As my own personal reaction and protest, I decided to rotate the motif on some paintings 90 degrees and create this installation. Rather than turn my paintings upside down, the 90 degrees suffices as my own sign of distress.
I have been arranging my recent works on paper close together as multipart works. This is in opposition to my work on canvas that seemed to demand its isolation. I did paint, however, three diptychs, "Ding & Dang", 2006, 40" x 60", "The Black Place/The White Place", 2014, 72" x 137" and "Coyote", 2016, 35" x 60", so there is some precedent and openness in my thinking.
Many things came to the fore as I focused on this project. I realized that although each of these paintings may not create a visual harmony when hung in proximity to each other, they came to be stand ins for our social contract with each other and a commentary about social justice. We don't always get along, but the other is present, and sometimes in such a way that we are not comfortable. The portrait format also reinforces this. Agitation and provocation come to mind with an endpoint of togetherness. Each of these paintings is painted to stand alone, and yet, envisioned as part of an ensemble.
The suite has its origins in the rhythms and colors of the landscape, yet they are called "Locations" to give them non-specificity. My paintings are about location, the bedrock and determinant of civilization. A reference is made to geography, the natural world, not as metaphor, but as experience. We ignore the stewardship of our environment at our own peril. In the end, everyone experiences art through their own devices. I strive to make paintings that never look the same every time they're looked at.
I arrived at thirty-two paintings when I went to repurpose salvaged clear pine 1x lumber that I had recovered from a house remodel project many years ago. I determined that I had just enough lumber to construct thirty-two stretcher bars for this new endeavor.
The final sign that thirty-two was, indeed, the number of paintings for the project was found in the book I was reading at the time. At the end of the third chapter of Terry Tempest Williams' "The Hour of Land," entitled, "Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota -All this the wind knows -" she writes a "terrain of verbs" that numbered thirty-two, a sign that I was on the right path. I have taken one of these 32 verbs as the title of each painting in this suite, more as referential than descriptive.