I left my studio, my home, my job, New York, the USA in September 2017 to spend a sabbatical year in France. The aim was to leave the familiar and become a foreigner in Paris, to work in media less familiar to me and to become a student again. In my small apartment in the 11th Arrondissement, I eked out a studio in the corner. This required that I use materials and techniques that would neither damage the room nor compromise my living situation. For me, limitations of this sort induce creativity. After having just before completed a large installation, I had to adapt my creative process to my physical surroundings and began making collages. Tarlatan gauze used in a printmaking studio where I had begun to work intruiged me and became the primary material for the series that unfolded. Along with the gauze, I used other familiar materials: graphite, charcoal, acrylic paint and matt medium.
This series developed during the dark days of winter when nights are sixteen hours long and Paris turns into a black and white scene: gray skies, black leafless trees, off-white buildings. Days would pass without seeing the sun. Color retreats indoors and Parisians follow. Used to a colder but sunnier winter in New York, and being seasonally affected, these conditions might have sent me into despondency, but I instead used the nuanced world of dim light and grays to create these works. They could have only been done in Paris, in winter, from my perch of a studio.
This series developed during the dark days of winter when nights are sixteen hours long and Paris turns into a black and white scene: gray skies, black leafless trees, off-white buildings. Days would pass without seeing the sun. Color retreats indoors and Parisians follow. Used to a colder but sunnier winter in New York, and being seasonally affected, these conditions might have sent me into despondency, but I instead used the nuanced world of dim light and grays to create these works. They could have only been done in Paris, in winter, from my perch of a studio.
Above image: Untitled (Paris 7_1.18), 2018 (detail)