AUNT MAMIE'S AFGHAN Painting

In my current series of ‘Afghans’ I take the traditional concept of these practical, crocheted blankets associated with another age of female craft as a starting point for expressing something further on canvas. I mean to blur the line between art and craft and to re-explore the idea of the field painting with its lack of traditional focal point. I create works that can be read or skimmed from left to right, figure by figure, along each horizontal strand as with words on the page, sheet music, or hieroglyphic symbols. At the same time each of these figures often takes on an individual character, having relationships in limited space, peaceful or competitive, with those figures above or below. I am also a filmmaker and see correlations between my work as a painter and the lengths of moving film I use to make motion pictures. In each, no single visual element holds the key to the overall effect. The viewer’s eye changes from one area of focus to another in a process of continual movement. I associate crocheted afghans with my grandmother and great aunts from Idaho, Wyoming and the other western states I visited as a child on long family road trips. Consequently, my works are sometimes infused with the memories of the colors and textures I saw there. Some, however, are based more in the imagined exotic as the name ‘afghan’ might imply, sometimes incorporating aspects from various mythologies. This first work based on this concept is of an afghan given to me by my great aunt Mamie. In it she used the short, bright-colored ends of yarn left over from other projects. One day, when a friend failed to show for a portrait session, the interlocking lines of this work of hers caught my eye, and I began spontaneously painting a version of this multicolored gift. Hanging hardware included.