Pennsylvania

Over the past year I have incorporated interference paints in my paintings. The paint has particles that send light in two different directions. Two people who are standing side by side looking at a painting using interference paints are not going to be seeing the same painting.

Because of their special effects nature, i didn’t expect to use interference paints much, but they seem insistent, like part of my vocabulary. If I don’t include them, i miss their optical trickery.

In this 40 x 40 painting I decided to forget that rule and have them become more dominant. Still when I came up with an idea for how to use them, i still felt they still needed to be curbed or cloaked to reduce their flamboyance.

So I chose a form that played against the angularity of the plaid. The result was effective and when the title, Pennsylvania, fell from the sky, the tumblers clicked.

I grew up in Pennsylvania and for the most part enjoyed a leafy childhood with a large play radius. But it’s also where I learned to cloak my colors. This painting then is not about pieced material, or quilting, activities one might associate with my relatives in rural Pennsylvania. This painting was about a specific taffeta plaid skirt a neighbor or someone in my family wore and my knowing, at age 10 or 11, that I had to cover my reactions to its fabulousness.

As I drafted the composition, I was not conscious of the origin of the story wanting to be told. It was only at the end as I sat and did my long looking that I understood it was a sad commentary about cloaking a child’s fascination. The lilac background, a color I’ve rarely used, is one of the step-down colors in the Victorian mourning code, allowable after a year of black.

The off white cover offers a hint of optimism as it is blown off the colors beneath it.