The Portals Tapestries

Terroir in Pattern and Color

Many of the best artworks I have made started with a happy accident. The entire Tapestries series started one day when my art group—Art Safari—decided to work big. Really big. We had been inspired by the large work (almost 12 feet high) of Hilma af Klint (Paintings for the Temple, painted 1907-1915.) Like Hilma, we wanted to walk and crawl on our canvases and to lose ourselves in the swirl and world of our paintings. 

I found an old canvas drop cloth we had used to paint the house, and took that along with an ample supply of acrylics. We were working outside on the ground and I just happened to drop my canvas on a little driveway that had cracks and crumbled asphalt—whose surface was covered with gouges, pebbles and stray twigs etc on it. As I painted, the form and texture of that aging driveway came through the canvas creating a rubbing, a distinctive pattern of that very place. I’d made rubbings of old gravestones as a child—but this was a rubbing of that very particular spot on the earth.

I did not notice the power of the pattern that day because I was set on painting something else. But later I noticed the pattern. And it was fascinating. I found some other big pieces of cheap canvas drop cloth and made some rubbings of other pieces of earth, other ground. I was suddenly filled with a strong desire to make brilliant abstract worlds of color on un-sized, un-gessoed, un-stretched low-quality canvas that could be hung as a tapestry. To each b/w rubbing, I added brilliant saturated color.

Often, animals were hidden in the color and sometimes I helped them take stronger form. Even with strong color and with strong patterns of black and white, my eye wanted more pattern to contain these abstract worlds, so I added a ribbon of chevrons—white on black—as a border.