One of my favorite paintings recently found a new home with a great person I went to Old Dominion University with. Here is part of the statement I shared with him and his family.
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| Ligature (Ties That Bind) - 50 x 40 Inches |
Ligature
(Ties That Bind)
Started
and Completed May 2012
lig·a·ture (noun)
1. Something
that is used to bind; specifically: a filament (as a thread) used in surgery.
2. Something
that unites or connects; a bond.
3. The
action of binding or tying.
4. A
compound note in mensural notation indicating a group of musical notes to be
sung to one syllable.
5. A
printed or written character (as æ or ƒƒ) consisting of two or more
letters or characters joined together.
- Merriam Webster
Usually I name the painting
before I begin, and I often research the words I’ll use in the title
beforehand. I wanted to depict connectivity between people with this piece as
well as further explore my visual interpretation of romantic poems for my husband Stephen
and sometimes loving journal-type entries for my daughter or other family
members. The word ligature came to
mind, and when I looked it up, I liked how the many definitions could exemplify
the concepts of the work. I also liked how it sounds close to literature.
Ligature
often invokes criminal or medical meanings, but I was definitely fixated on
meaning 2 above. However, meaning 4 resonated with how I flow from one to word
to the next, stream-of-consciousness style, often without lifting the charcoal
from the surface. Visual and aural cadences influence my mark-making, so I
really liked the musical connotation. The connected letters described in
meaning 5 reinforced that analogy for how I often write on the paintings.
Sometimes I plan most of my
text before I get started on the canvas, but that’s not the norm. I prefer
instead to riff off the title and improvise with intuition as my guide. But you
can see some of the phrasing, and you can see that I jump from third person to
first. Because most of my work deals with memories and how we interpret them
over time, I like to keep points of view fluid… looking inward as my real self,
but just as easily sliding outward to see myself or my relationships as others
might see them, such as these lines from the piece:
Just one eternal line
connecting them
tying me
binding me ever always
to you
While the above strongly
reads as romantic (which is accurate), it equally reflects my fascination with a
decades-old poem by a Japanese schoolchild:
I think the country grandmother
was born from another grandmother
way way out in the country.
It goes all the way back—just women.
It makes me think of how far
humankind goes back, and how far we can go forward into the future. It makes me
think of how we are blank slates molded by genetics and our environments.
This piece is from a series
I originally called Veils in which
very thin washes are applied to a monochromatic field, but this series was
absorbed by my Evidence series. The
initial thought behind Veils was to
make what I write more legible, to be more transparent about my intentions. But
I found that revealing my private self in a public way made me feel too
vulnerable and also took it too easy on the viewer; they couldn’t bring their own
history to the piece. And I hope knowing the stories behind the piece doesn’t
color your interpretations too much.
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