The Other Layers…

The Fool

As Seen In:

• “Beneath Strange Rocks” at Sugarwall Gallery, January 2025

Materials:

• cradleboard

• acrylic spraypaint

• watercolor ground in various colors

• watercolor paint

• china marker

The entire series of these paintings shares the same name as the large piece, There Are Layers Here You’re Not Considering. This project began with 12 strange landscape-like drawings that incorporated many of the shapes seen throughout the painted works. I decided to use rock-like shapes, the layer-cake-like spiral towers, hexagons, and the concept of mist to draw the moods together. Importantly, however, I also listened to what the work itself was telling me it wanted to be. This page is a selection of those works.

In “The Fool” there is a little squiggle-shape on top of the big rock-shape that reminded me of the dog that joins The Fool on the mountaintop adventure in many depictions of the tarot card of that name. I did not paint that shape, nor did I carve it into the surface of the painting. It happened and there was no way to make it un-happen, so I leaned in and made it the most important piece of the picture.

“Echota”, titled with a Cherokee word for “town” also embraces a lot of accidental features in the underpainting. The texture of what can be argued as rolling hills came from the methods and tools I used to apply the watercolor ground over the primer. This painting isn’t as exciting as a lot of my other works, and I understand why it gets overlooked, but there is still a great deal of emotion in it.

One of the first pieces I completed in this series was “Momentum”. It leans more abstract and less figurative, but was intended to be an exercise in exploring depth. I often try to play with the permeability of the barrier between artwork and viewer in works like this, usually with the edges. In this piece, however, there are several shapes seemingly floating on the surface of the painting. Blues and blacks force the background of the piece deeper into space and suddenly this collection of shapes isn’t just shapes anymore it’s somewhere. That, combined with the irregularity of the patterns draws the viewer deeper into the space, marking a special addition to my skillset.

The silver-grey scaffolding on the hand in “Hypermobility” are inspired by assistive devices used by a lot of folks who have hypermobile joints. These devices look a lot like fancy, audacious ring sets, but the primary purpose of them is to keep the wearer from dislocating the many, many joints in the human hand. Adaptive technology like this is often seen by those who don’t understand it as someone trying to make a fashion statement. In fact, disabled people get a lot of weird comments from the persistently-able-bodied for use of any sort of accommodations from braces to wheelchairs to this bizarre notion that adding ramps or elevators to a building plan is somehow destroying the historical value of that building. But it isn’t the way that things look that determine their function or value, it is how those things operate to improve the lives of those who use them. Madelene L’Engle put it best in A Wrinkle In Time: it’s not what things look like that matter, it’s what things are like.