Rachel Off: Painting moved, and now we only Skype...

Untitled Piece by Judith Scott

I miss painting... I feel like a friend moved away and I have little to no communication with them anymore. I've been reading High Times, Hard Times. It's about painters working in New York in the late sixties early up until 75'. Most of whom were dealing with the idea that painting, after Ab-Ex and post-minimalism, was in fact dying. Painting for me has just moved away for a little. It hasn't died. I have to step away from it for a little while in order to rethink its importance. Well, I'm not fully getting away. I actually did start a painting this week. I'm working off one of the pieces that I did a couple weeks ago. I'm going to continue to bounce around like this for a little while. Working with 'textiles' like yarn and string, and fabric. These will be my 'finished works'. Then i'll paint them, as if they were a still-life. I'm using painting as a way to discover the importance of the other pieces. If i spend a half hour on a yarn piece and then fifteen hours rendering it, what is the interaction between the two? Or maybe this works vice-versa and i spend fifteen hours weaving and knitting and then an hour with an abstraction of it. What is the conversation between the two pieces then? One thing I'm missing about painting is the imagination of it. The materials I'm using now have such a tie into real life that its hard to escape their utility. They also function like a ready-made in some ways. When I choose a few materials for a piece, then my color and texture choices are already made. Then the assemblage just flows. There are so many more choices involved in painting: color, shape, constancy, the possibilities are almost endless. I'm learning this as I move between the different styles, painting and constructing. When your painting you can create your own reality for the piece, but with the other material they already have a reality and a function. Part of this process is trying to free these common materials from there fate of being crocheted into some tacky sweater no one will ever wear. I'm trying to use the textiles as a end in themselve and painting as a means to that end. So, heres a couple shots of what I'm working on and who I'm looking at.