Two more weeks left to see the painting “entangled spirits” in the flesh at my solo show “arabesque” at Nancy Toomey Fine Art at the Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco! It is up until April 29th, 2017. This painting, I’m thrilled to say, has been sold with 3 other paintings, siblings going to a new home together.
This being my official first blog post (ok, second), I thought I’d write a bit about this painting in particular – one of my newest. I really was aware of wanting to work with green, as it’s a color I have tended to avoid. I have so many bottles of green ink I haven’t used! I know there’s energy in what we reject, and though I didn’t have a conscious reason for not using greens, there was clearly a rich well of unconscious meaning to bring up by using it. There was some unfamiliar feelings and push back that has proved to have some unexpected power & energy. I’ll leave that for you to interpret your own way – clearly it’s not just green, but black, bronze, light blue, and pomegranate seed magenta pink that completes the painting’s palette.
As for patterns, I am exploring two new (to me) interlace patterns that I lifted from Leonardo Da Vinci (1500s) who clearly got them via Islamic sources (my guess is the 13th century or earlier). These are the light green and blue/bronze interlace patterns in the painting. There’s also Japanese interlace (in the style of abstracted birds) – the black section; An optically trippy Chinese screen pattern (the bronze section); and lastly an Islamic pattern of Spanish/Moroccan origin (pink magenta). It feels as if I’ve woven them together in a disrupted and harmonious way – creating a labryinthine space to get lost in. Broken screens, veils, sewing things together or coming apart…
OK, there’s much more to it, but I hope you will get to see it…
http://nancytoomeyfineart.com/artists-exhibitions/carole-silverstein-arabesque/
