d’Arte Board

This piece is from a few years ago and represents the biggest single advancement I’ve ever made in my method. The basic concept came to me when I was making “Holes” as something of a joke. What if I took 2 of those and interlocked them like a chain?

As happens when I make jokes like that, I had to figure out a way to do it. Everything else I’d done with these safety pinned pieces may have been a pain to accomplish but was pretty straightforward once I knew what I wanted to accomplish. This piece, by contrast felt like math homework. How do you fit 2 pieces that are fully complete in their own rights onto 1 frame (which is essentially what’s going on here)? Somehow, when one piece got the middle of the work, it had to get out of the other piece’s way.

It took me a month of trial and error before I realized that the safety pins themselves presented the solution. Where the pins present a break in the strand of canvas being woven, there is room to stuff another strand through it. Doing this across the piece allowed for one piece to submarine below the other as needed. So everytime the purple meets the white, the purple submarines below the white and continues to the edge of the piece out of sight (And vice versa).

I doubt that made sense to anyone but me. And frankly, every time I do a new version of these I have to re-learn the exact process. But this is the first time I ever imagined something I didn’t know how to do and found a way to accomplish it, so I hold more pride in it than a lot of other stuff I’ve done. Visually I don’t think most people actually make sense of what’s going on when they see these. Oh well.

-JD

This entry was posted on March 9, 2010 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting, Safety-Pins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.