Spill, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, 60″x48″

PJ: I don’t know what to call these curls and strands, do you have terminology to talk about them? Or do you prefer to see this assortment all at once, all by itself? The elements seem to have various characteristics that play off each other, which is fun and draws me in.

Lisa: I think about ’spill’ as an explosion of strands, a language of fibers I had been working with for a couple of years prior to this painting. I see ’spill’ as an accumulation of discreet hairs that pour into a unified amalgamation. I had worked with similar mark making and imagery before painting ’spill’. However, up until this point, I’d been exclusively drawing tiny, meticulous animal and hair imagery on large expanses of white paper. I had been working with such a minimal palette, values limited by graphite on white paper, and with such a somber and melancholic presentation that I was ready to pan out the same concepts with color, paint, and bolder gestures. Thanks for describing it as fun – fun and humor were definitely motifs I was interested in incorporating into my work.

PJ: Memories surface all the time. Maybe as we age we remember more places we’ve been because we’ve been more places? Could you share any memory or place or situation that surfaced while painting “spill” or were you totally engaged with the paint and the brush or are you thinking only about the subject of the painting, or the structure of it?

Lisa: Memory is one of the issues central to my work. A dynamic process of fabrication rather than a storehouse of fixed images, memory depends on your current emotional state and is therefore a system of creation in a constant state of flux. I probably relived countless memories while working on ’spill’. I remember thinking about a certain recurring childhood dream and lessons by Arnold Mesches about the composition of “The Raft of the Medusa”. But I also remember feeling very present with the painting and attempting to engage various characteristics of the paint I was working with in terms of opacity, transparency and layering.

Thanks Peter, talk to you soon,
lisa
www.LasHermanasIglesias.com