Paint/Rags 2015 – 2017
My Paint/Rag series began to develop, not just out of an interest in making the paint look and act like a rag, but in the linguistic idea which is embedded in the title: paint – slash – rag. To say and hear the word paint rag, is to conjure up an image of just that, a rag you would use to clean up paint, brushes, spills and the like. But to read the title is to apprehend the slash, which separates the material from the idea, both literally and metaphorically, and undercuts our assumptions about what exactly we’re looking at.
The slash captures the humor in its duplicity. What you see is not what you think you see. It also takes Duchamp’s notion of the readymade and turns it on its head by creating from scratch something that looks like a readymade. Making what I call a high falutin’ art object about something as abject and humble as a paint rag makes us look twice at the kind of thing we normally would toss in the garbage.
So while they appear to look like rags or decorative fabrics, they have in fact, no cloth or canvas behind them at all. They are made entirely of paint, and the colors and patterns you see are not only surface applications, but accretions of color that have been built up over time and make themselves apparent in the undersides and on the edges because of the way the paint has been manipulated, torn and draped.