to those creations, those imaginary scenes, gestures, and expressions? What happens to the persons you created and the life they lived in your mind when they are ruthlessly replaced by a different reality? In a flat-footed way it’s the same experience of reading a novel, creating an entire visual theater in your mind of the cast of characters/ events, and then experiencing the disappointment of seeing the movie. The complicated figures you had drafted are replaced by another person’s imaginings and it feels empty and foreign. My new work is about engaging those memories of fictitious conjuring before they slide and slip away and are replaced by a more palpable reality. With this additional spark I was able to make connections, draw links and lines between the different fragments I had been collecting over the course of two years. In a way this process is mimicked in the work itself. In my current body of work, each image serves as a character for a larger narrative; scraps of a past that I personally have little knowledge of. As a small child we lived in a trailer, we had a pet raccoon, my biological father had long blond hair, he grew up in the swamps of South Carolina, and smoked a lot of pot. But again this work is less about a personal narrative but rather a jumping off point to consider how one constructs narratives and how personal and collective stories are concocted and conceived. It examines how fantasy lives often swirl up around the smallest of ideas, gaining force and power the more you ponder them, until they birth a life of their own, separate and unearthed from the “reality” that was just a flash in time. I think this new work twists and exploits notions of nostalgia for a lost youth, when everything was seemingly possible, and a longing for an idealism somehow unmarred by defeat and failure. There is a lingering desire to hold sweet and superficial ideals but they collide with an unraveling discomfort and dissolution. There is an attempt to freeze the past, yet the future continues to creep in, distorting and disturbing the vision. Though they feel really different for me, this work is probably viewed as a continuation of paintings that experiment with a range of narrative structures. X Characters are created to attempt to move beyond victim-hood, trauma, and helplessness to a continually evolving “now.” Internal vs. external lives are merged and the past, present, and future slide and slip, creating blanks and hollows. It is in this space between where meaning is formed. To work on anything with real intensity it has to come from a personal place of interest. It has to resonate deeply. The work doesn’t end there and I certainly hope people see them as much more open-ended than that... I used to keep those early narrative threads that instigate the works more hidden, for fear that people would see them as only that. But I have to trust that if people are really interested they will bring more to the dialogue than that. I know when I attend artist talks or read interviews I prefer the personal anecdotes to the highflautin art speak, so I’ve opened up. It’s a risk but I hope a worthy one. V: Can you explain, technically, how your work progresses? Do you first start with a concrete painting, and add paint after? Or you already exactly know how you want it to look like at the end? A.F: Well, as I alluded to the slowest part of the process is just coming up with an idea of what I want to paint. What the subject is, the conceptual motivation. I sketch. I read. I write. I find fragments of literature, poetry, snippets of text that evoke a certain feeling. I find images that I think will support a mood I’m after… I also create videos and photographs to work from. I force my husband to wear a wig, dress up myself and shoot hours of video- complete with fog machine or uncomfortable lighting. Then, to get to the part that I think you’re actually asking about, I stretch the 6 x 8 ft panels with canvas, gesso and then just dive in. I do a sketch in vine charcoal to find the composition. Wipe it off entirely so there is just a ghost of an image. I do an under-painting to build up a full sense of the composition and then that first day I lay the painting horizontal and do a thin pour. A lot of people think I paint the figurative portion of the painting to completion first and then pour a mixture of oil and synthetic resin on top. It’s much more back and forth. I liken it to a collaborative process as the paint seemingly has its own will and the process alternates between control and chance. I go back and forth
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like this as many times as it takes to resolve the piece. It inevitably invites indiscriminate painterly moments that I don’t intentionally create or control. After a night of letting the painting “sit” I’ll come back to the studio to find the image has been tragically, lifted, eroded, sometimes obliterated. Days worth of work might be erased in one night. XThe migration of paint moving across the panel chemically alters whatever is in its path, destroying the once precious image. This results in unpredictable effects, as the pours mix with wet brushed paint. Sometimes the paint will lift and flake the figure, leaving islands of “skin” floating in juicy slabs of paint. Other times it will bead and pool into mitochondrial shaped colonies. The figurative elements develop boils, sags or sometimes break apart while the abstraction may appear three- dimensional; anywhere from seductive and candy coated to flagging open gapes that look stretched and tar - like. Oscillating between the two methods allows the two elements to build along with the narrative. Imbedding and intertwining, the figurative and abstract elements become one, forever influencing the other’s appearance. There is a real topographical element to the paintings. V: Are you interested in others forms of art? Do you practice something else, or collaborate with artists? A.F: I have a great deal of respect and in interest in many forms of making. Especially the things I can’t do myself. A couple years ago I took some beginning piano lessons and that feeling of being so new at something was shocking. It was uncomfortable but exciting. I have had some formal collaborative moments, mostly with writers (brilliant women like Emma Wunsch, Claire Barliant, and Fran Varian) but our intentions have yet to materialize into anything beyond their nascent stages. I think there are so many parallels between painting and writing. As mentioned, my work is very much about how narrative is created and constructed and I have spent many hours deconstructing creative fiction, analyzing it… it’s something I’ve studied and have engaged in behind closed doors but I don’t know if I’ll ever leak those feeble attempts out to the public. Maybe someday. But for now, I’ll just sit in awe of the brilliant people I have the good fortune to know and those I don’t. Perhaps less formally, but most importantly, I believe I’m continually collaborating with my husband. We make very different work but I think at the base there is a lot of sharing of ideas and suggestions for how those ideas find form. I don’t know how other artist couple’s work but we run absolutely everything by each other. He’s a huge part of my process and I his. I trust him and his opinions and though we don’t make final works of art together its fair to say we each have a heavy hand in the other’s work. V: What do you think of the art world today? Do you consider it as active, creative, or on the contrary, that it doesn’t take too much risk? A.F: I think there is so much opportunity today and it’s a truly wonderful playing field where anything is a viable form of art. There is nothing that is off limits and the possibilities are endless. It’s exciting! Of course that openness comes with its problems. In a field with no boundaries it may be difficult to discern a works value. But it’s an open, living, breathing organism ripe with life and opportunity. Each person can find their own place in it and create new pathways- how far we’ve come. How much better to choose form a buffet than to have only one thing to eat that everyone agrees is good. When you’re inside a thing it doesn’t feel like change- it doesn’t feel like movement, it doesn’t feel risky or active, but in looking back those forces of movement reveal themselves. There are still social structures at work that determine what art will get noticed. The collectors tastes determine what sells, the museum boards fear of losing donors determines what work will be exhibited to the public… these all play a role in what will receive attention. Its not that interesting or provocative work isn’t being made. You might just have to dig deeper to find it. But I think the Internet helps level those scales. It sidesteps the economic limitations and curbs censorship.
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