Postcards from the Pink City

Postcards from the Pink City

Posted on
0

31 Aug – 30 Sep 2020
Book Coffee
No.131 30 thang 4 Street, Phu Hoa, Thu Dau Mot, Binh Duong City

From the organizer:

Postcards from the Pink City is a collection of postcard-sized works on paper, created at the time of my first visit to India.

These paintings capture the overall sensory experience of my first time in Jaipur. They are an abstract expression of a conflicted cacophony for all five senses: an appreciation of the colorful architectural and sartorial beauty of Jaipur’s palaces, forts, and public spaces as experienced from inside a tuk tuk through the noise, heat, and smog of rush hour traffic, as the exquisite culinary flavors and textures, and the scents of perfumes and spices compete with the odors of dirt, exhaust fumes, rubbish, and animal dung for a permanent place in my sensory memory.

As chance would have it, I coincidentally acquired a variety of shades of pink paints and collage materials that made their way into this body of work, enabling the creation of these paintings, which are reminiscent of my sensory experiences of Jaipur, and my first impressions of Rajasthan, and all of India.

These works allow me as an artist, as well as my viewers to experience the use and appreciation of the color pink on its own artistic merits outside the context of its heavily loaded use as a traditional gender indicator.

Postcards from the Pink City was not created as a direct artistic representation of my experience in Jaipur, nor a response or homage to the artists of Rajasthan. However, looking at these small works on paper, seem to evoke in their color pallette, texture, movement and composition, an emotional, psychological and sensory response similar to that created by the unfiltered and sometimes overwhelmingly complex symphony of flavors, textures, colors, smells, and sounds of the city’s essence, which remained fresh in my mind at the time these works were created.

This body of work is my first one to be made entirely after leaving behind my life in New Orleans and moving to Vietnam to begin a new career as a full time ESL teacher. They are my first ones created with the challenges and opportunities presented by the semi-transient lifestyle of an expat ESL teacher.

Postcards allow travellers to retain the memory of a special place or destination and share their experience with others. Postcards, however, often depict their subjects in artificial splendor and unnatural contexts. By removing representational images, and the false narratives their depictions often create, Postcards from the Pink City allow the use of color, texture, movement and composition to produce an abstract representation of the genuine sensory and emotional experience of the location.

This collection of mixed media and collage paintings is loosely inspired by the paint pouring and fluid art movement, which uses acrylic media, silicone, and sometimes blowtorches to create colorful paintings with bubble-like cells and other dynamic elements.

Although none of these small works have been made in the traditional paint pouring process, they are primarily created by various water based and acrylic media being poured or dropped onto the surface.

Onto these paintings, various paints are added, sometimes as little as one drop at a time, to closely control the movement and interactions of the different types of liquid media, such as acrylic paints, watercolors, poster paints, gel medium, and acrylic ink. These are added in various quantities and viscosities, and are allowed to interact with one another and with the textured collage surfaces made from paper, cardboard and tissue paper, flowing and drying into dynamic compositions that often contain tactile and sculptural elements.

Follow updates event’s page.

NO COMMENTS

Leave a Reply