From Pennsylvania artist Claudia McGill comes the eye-popping piece shown above, sides A and B. It is a repurposed card such as Claudia likes to use, often finding these chance canvases among her junk mail or cutting them postcard-sized from cereal boxes and the like. She repaints them, draws on them, collages them and then sends them back into the world as art. I was thrilled to get one of her pieces, which are highly valued, and quite rightly so, among the mail-art community.
The image at the top features broadly applied strokes of vibrant paint in a series of frames and boxes that enclose the central subject: the diagonal black slash that doubles as a hill upon which a calligraphic human figure seems to be arrested in mid-climb by a contemplation of the sun poised over his/her shoulder. There are various asemic marks and scratches in the paint surface which add texture and mystery as well as a random-spray pattern of black paint that impart a dynamism to the overall composition.
The bottom image has an entirely different feel, with the clear demarcation between the left and right sides of the picture plane. The eye passes from one state (of mind) to the other as if from night to day and back again. The red box on the right recalls Rothko, doubled, in this case, by the purple box that surrounds it, and departing from Rothko by the bands of color upon which the boxes float. On the left we have a spattered cosmos of starry white milky drops; indeed, a kind of milky way. Bits of text show through the "intergalactic" darkness giving tantalizing clues to a meaning we sense we will never entirely grasp. But take a step backward, so to speak, visually, and unify the image. What you get is a kind of alternative American flag, a retinal after-burn of the stars-and-stripes...glimpsed, this time around, by some Francis Scott Key of the future after a nuclear holocaust? Or, more hopefully, perhaps this can be the flag of the "other" America, the silenced, the sick, the poor, the still huddled, the still yearning to breathe free?
Claudia's work encompasses a wide range of materials and formats: handmade books, collage, and fabric, to name several. All of it is marked by an exuberance of color, invention, and spirit. You can see more of her work at her blog, as well as links to some of her writing and thoughts on art and life. She even offers detailed descriptions of some of her techniques which you can try on your own. I highly recommend you pay her a visit: claudiamcgillart.wordpress.com/
I have totally floored by this wonderful examination of my work, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it. What a compliment you have paid me to look at my work with such close attention and that you enjoy it. I do love mail art for the freedom it gives me to try all kinds of things and I especially like that it has given me a voice I might now have otherwise discovered. And then also to find people who take my art, and their own, seriously - that's so encouraging to me.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for taking the time to do this. It means a lot to me.Claudia