CHROMA: YELLOW

In 2019, four members of the Hana Kark Collective — encaustic artist Caryl St. Ama, painter Margaret Lazzari, mixed-media artist Nancy Kay Turner, and I — began a collaborative project using color as a commonality. It became known as Chromatic Collaboration. We each worked independently to create 25 birch plywood panels, 6” x 6” each, for every primary and secondary color. We started with blue, intending to work our way through the spectrum, with no clear idea of how we would ultimately assemble the work or where the process might lead. Our first exhibitions, mid-process, were in September 2019.

Yellow was the fifth color. In the red series I used single words and phrases without knowing where they would lead. I had many gessoed pages left over, and I began combining them to tell small tales. Stitching on paper for the red series also got me thinking about how paper and cloth are alike and how they differ, and how I might work with the two together. I tried many approaches, [one or two examples, such as weaving paper strips or layering gauze over stitched paper].

These pieces interact with one another. The imagery flows from panel to panel, and the words carry on across them, with lines like “messy and hard were the times” and, on the second panel, “surely it is the end.”

Each stitched piece is laminated to 3/4” baltic birch plywood, stained yellow. Click on the images below for a close-up view and detailed description.