Patterns
Gina and I have been working on some patterns lately. This is the first time we’ve sat down and made patterns that actually repeat. It’s had me thinking of the influence patterns and textiles have had on our work over the years. It’s come up in a bunch of jobs, but really, I’ve been thinking of how it played a role in the early parts of our personal collaborations.Just before we started working on paintings together, I was working out this idea of weighing mechanically reproduced methods against hand reproduced methods. I had these screen prints that would be intentionally imperfect, and then repeated oil paint areas that were as near to identical as I could get them. I had painted about a dozen of these paintings on my own, and thought they were done.
Then we had the idea of working together. To get started, I handed these paintings over to Gina. She added an entirely different dimension, and things became more than a simple one-two comparison. This is how some of that work looked by around ’01 or ’02.
Over the years, we’ve continued to draw upon repeats and from textile examples for various reasons. At some point we figured out that gender issues would be inherent in anything made together by a boy and a girl. I liked the way that, by using paint that referenced textiles, the issue was imbedded right there in the material.
We’ve cooled out on gallery shows in the last few years, but the last one we really threw ourselves into was at 222 Gallery. There I made a seemless screen print that covered a whole wall. I posted about it back then on Drawger. This got me interested in making some patterns that could actually be repeated on fabric. Kind of coming full circle from just looking at fabric to make paintings, we’re now making paintings that we’re envisioning as fabric.
Here’s some of them.
We’ve got a large batch, but I like these best so far. I’ll be posting more later.
Cheers, Matt