Painting in journals for me began with my recovery from a serious illness which left me hypersensitive to oil paint. During my hospitalization, confined to working in sketchbooks, I produced my first journal-painting. Later, learning to work in acrylics was a glorious challenge. I loved that it forced paintings to be in constant dialogue with drawing, but the vexing business of having to save paint every time I mixed a new color drove me into the arms of watercolor. For many years I had resisted it. Perhaps it was because I subscribed in some way to the market prejudice against works on paper and watercolor as an inferior medium. Common wisdom (an oxymoron if ever there was one) cautioned that watercolor was difficult and unforgiving. This of course was pure nonsense. As my journal practice developed, I became more invested in its nimbleness and mobility. Filling books with paintings suddenly made more sense to me than producing art for the wall–and freed me from an economy of art that was inextricably tied to real estate and conspicuous consumption. It gave me a kind of freedom. It also freed me from any hope of showing and selling. In the end I realized that the wall must have its due, and engaged in numerous conversations with people who were kind enough to provide invaluable advice regarding my cockamamie pocket-paintings, including Charlie Bergman, Eric Brown, Joseph Goddu, Barney McHenry, Steve Miller, Bridget Moore, David reel and Dick Solomon, who observed the problem at hand was “how to get the genie out of the bottle”.
Steps are being taken. Scans of page-spreads are being transformed into limited-edition suites of high-quality digital prints that will be published as “broken books”–unbound sheets with a chapbook set within a solander box. Each page-spread will be presented as an open book, resting on the page as a trompe-l’oeil image. The owner can either keep the pages together in its loose binding–or frame, and display them on the wall. If you wish to receive updates or find out how to order one of these suites, please write to:
www.info@needlewatcher.com, subject line “Prints”