Special, No Place

Found Lines in Text and Motion

This painting holds tension between crisis and optimism, struggle and growth. Everything is patched together, yet somehow cohesive — an embodiment of found lines: lines of text, the white-lined background, and the lines of string. The combined effect is both vibrant and complex.

This face looks at us head-on — a tangled mix of paint, stamping, collage, and a clump of string bracing up the neck. The collage elements are woven throughout — from sandpaper to text and images. Collage fragments include sheet music, wallpaper scraps, card stock, a woman’s face, and Greek columns.

The mind in this portrait is a busy place, with everything from hieroglyphics to text: "How does a fly walk upside down? No Place. Special. Happy. What You Can Do. Don’t. Crisis." Textual moments of optimism include "Cool, Everything’s All Right, Sign for A…, Hoping, My heart is pure, those souls might be of use." And on and below the lips — "held, a restrained smile" — making this piece a modern nod to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The string was a dirt-encrusted find, with interwoven lines that held the potential for expression. Embedded in the painting, the tangled string reads as muscle, vein, or perhaps restriction or scarring. In contrast, flowers emerge from the shoulder, even providing perch for a bird.

I’ve titled the piece Special, No Place. I selected these particular text fragments because the mood of this portrait is both exploding with thoughts and vibrant energy...yet scrambling to find a center. The array of thoughts are both special and ordinary. The sense of hectic motion and thoughts give the figure gravity, but no ground — ideas weighed down and unmoored at once.