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 Carlyn Clark — began a collaborative project using color as a commonality. It became known as Chromatic Collaboration. Working independently across primary and secondary colors, each artist created 25 distinct 6” x 6” birch plywood panels per color.

Yellow was the fifth color in the spectrum. Expanding on the text exploration in the Red series—where words and phrases were isolated on individual gessoed book pages—the artist began combining leftover pages to construct multi-panel narratives and small tales. Stitching on paper also prompted an inquiry into the tactile similarities and differences between paper and cloth, prompting experiments with woven paper strips, layered gauze, and hand-stitching across media.

Designed to interact with one another, several works in the Yellow series function as multi-panel diptychs where imagery and text flow across panels—forming extended phrases such as “messy and hard were the times” on one panel, continuing to “surely it is the end” on the next. Continuing the commitment to buy no new materials, each stitched piece is laminated to a 3/4” Baltic birch plywood panel stained yellow. Click on any image below for a close-up view and detailed description.