Empty Gloves, 2023

I had the idea of trying to describe the volume of a body form with netting, like how digital models are made of ‘meshes’. It ocurred to me I could use fishnet gloves, and the hands are maybe the hardest and least convenient option for this concept, so naturally I got really attached to the idea.

I purchased some real, rhinestone-covered gloves and took a lot of pictures of them on real live arms. I isolated the fishnets on photoshop and layered them together to make something of a mesh, in a provisional way, thinking I could transfer this onto my canvas to use as a guide. I was surprised by how much I liked the effect of the matte medium transfer and sanded parts of it away, with all the degredation this puts the image through. I stuck to my idea of painting the two layers of net in red and blue (a reference to primitive 3D imagery), but did this with a lighter hand to keep the textures of the orginal transfer.

This has me thinking about the ratio of concept to work in painting. There’s the idea, for people who make traditional artwork, that there’s inherent value to laborious subjects— drawing the chain link fence link by link, painting hair by hair— and it’s also the easiest way to conceptualize a project, since all it requires is time. This works well in a Lucien Freud portrait, where he has unfettered access to his sitter, but if your subject doesn’t really exist and your time is finite this approach isn’t so suitable. I felt like taking the time to articuate the colors and angles of the rhinestones on the gloves to be important because those details have a lot of power (makes the volume of the arm more persuasive, gives a viewer context and an idea of scale) and also because they were fun to do. I was less particular about parts of the netting because past the point of basic plausibility the effort I put into making them correct would be wasted (would it be noticeable? Would it be delightful?).

I was pleased to show this next to another recent painting in December 2023 because they share an ambiguity of POV that I’ve been having a good time testing the limits of: how impossible can a situation be before the scene becomes unintelligible? The angles of the arms do not work at all.