words_project

This project began as an exploration of the difference between lines used as a purely visual element and lines that make up letters and words, which suggest specific and intentional communication.

There are two elements in this piece. The first is 190 sheets of notebook paper with handwritten and typed lists of random words arrived at by free association and at times by request from friends, family and studio visitors. The second is a 45” x 45” painting of these approximately 18,000 words, painted freehand with copper acrylic on a dark blue ground. Each letter is ¼ centimeter high. The surface is densely packed, soft and shimmering, with slight irregularities. I view the sheets as the sketch for the visually rich and more viscerally pleasing painting. The irony is that the handwritten words are imbued with specific and clear intentional communication which is obscured in the painting.

On the handwritten sheets, the words and the medium are suggestive of the traditional presentation of words: the blackboard, school papers, a slide presentation of formulas, a computer spitting out words. Each is distinct, recognizable, and read-able. In the painting itself, even thought the words are identical, they’ve been transformed into something meaningless, devoid of content. They are still words in the moment that I say and then paint them, but the next moment they’ve lost a connection to their communicative function and exist as marks. They have become for the large part, pedestrian, and strike no chord for me. They’ve been absorbed.

The piece began with a lot of rules: no repetition, no names, must have significance. Initially I loved the words I used; they were beautiful, evocative, repellant, funny. As I went on the words began to lose their meaning, though I said them out loud as I transferred them from the written to the painted word. The rules changed. As the words accumulated and because they were not physically separated from those before, after, above or below they disappeared into the overall mass. Despite the meaning they had for me as I painted them they had become abstract repetitive elements.