I am still pinching myself that I will have 2 pieces hanging in the RA’s summer exhibition. It is crazy. I suspect more people will see mew work than have seen it in all the shows I have done combined. We were able to scramble birthday money, points, a hotel voucher and are flying to London for a whirlwind trip so I can be there for Varnishing Day. It is crazy that Roy will not be able to see the show though because only artists are allowed on varnishing Day. I am excited and nervous. I guess I finally am admitting that I have my share of social anxiety.
I am proud of these two pieces. They both were done quickly and spontaneously while I was playing with Gelli Plate printing. The subject and the drawing that went into my being able to do them occurred over many months and even years. And so they are part of my body of work and are somewhat more palatable versions of the charcoal drawings and watercolors I have done.
Encampment
In the fall of 2023 I started drawing a Tallit we owned as a way of processing my grief around the loss of life on October 7th and the weeks that followed. But that spring as we visited encampments at MIT and Harvard and spent time around students, including many who were Jewish, we saw the students wearing the Keffiyah as a statement against the violence and in support of peace and freedom. The students’ passion and their courage and willingness to speak out for justice inspired me to draw a Keffiyah in conversation with the Tallit. Those drawings became a document of my emotions and feelings surrounding the war and overtime captured my frustration at dialogue being shut down and the inability of people to listen and provide empathy. And those drawings and the studies I made of the patterns and fringes on both those garments interacting informed this print.
“This Your Noise”
It seems we have been protesting continuously: since Brexit, since Trump’s first term, since the publication of the IPCC’s 1.5 degree report. The theater of protest with the cardboard signs and their catchy slogans are now part of the resistance to a system that benefits the wealthy and harms everyone and everything else. Meanwhile the violence against and suppression of peaceful protest is increasing. I had been creating drawings where discarded covid tests looked like protest signs, and playing with how to capture this moment in time. One day in the studio while playing with my gelli plate this abstraction of all those drawings emerged.