It was almost one year ago that I began my wallpaper collection. I started by going to paint and wallpaper stores and looking through their collections of discontinued and defunct styles and patterns and buying rolls of paper. The older rolls are really paper and not vinyl, and they appealed to me because of the oddness and naivete of the patterns, and also because they cost almost nothing.
It was my intention to do some really large canvases, cover them over with wallpaper and then, and then I don’t know what I would have done. The idea was just about scale and materials, but I didn’t actually have an idea. I liked the notion that the paintings would be like big sections of old wall from a house in the fifties. I started on one of these pieces but all at once the idea seemed idiotic and I threw the wallpaper away except for two rolls that escaped the purge and remained in my studio on a shelf.
These two rolls of paper talk to each other. One thinks that they have been saved because they are the best papers, and therefore special, and the other roll thinks that they were just overlooked and will get thrown out eventually. Both rolls are correct, they were the best two rolls and they would have been thrown if I hadn't overlooked them.
The interaction of these two papers however sets a stage for a painted drawing that I am very pleased with . I glued the green paper down to some board, and then a glued the gold paper over as a kind of frame. Next I glazed the whole thing with a thin wash of white to unify the two patterns and on top of that I painted the figure of a woman with white paint, in a silhouette style.
The effect I am after is a figure seen at a great distance, All the forms of the figure merge into one simple shape and there are no details. This is a painting of a figure that we don’t know, and who is very far away, who’s character and appearance we have idealized.
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