Amelia Shearrow
language-generated color-field-esque abstract painting

For this work I continued my exploration of [email] conversations and painting abstraction. I created an abstract color representation of a conversation. I took a 12” x 12” stretched cotton canvas and affixed fiberglass screen repair tape onto the surface, creating a very tight gridded pattern to work on. I was able to then assign unique oil-based paint colors to letters and symbols for myself and ‘friend’, subsequently marking the corresponding color into a box shape on the gridded canvas. I used titanium white as a buffer to not only designate separation between words, but also to evoke feelings of the modern phone text screen and more traditional paper.

Furthermore, I was able to successfully not only translate the written dynamic between ‘friend’ and myself, but was also able to create a tangible manifestation of an abstraction of time through the manipulation of block size and inclusion of “lines” of white. By this I mean that when a conversation was responded to belatedly, I would add an additional “line”, reminiscent of a space in an email or lull in a conversation, to create a visual translation of this elapsed time. Additionally, I again tried to include time and memory into the painting by getting progressively larger in block size the closer I approached to the bottom of the painting. This size disparity is meant to emulate the ephemeral nature of not only texts (where the individual can opt for texts to be deleted after a certain period of time) but also the nature of memory (where the most recently encountered texts are by nature the most clear and prominent in the reader’s mind). Additionally, this increase in size also creates a natural path for the eye to read the painting in a more tablet or paper-like manner, due to the nature of the weight of the larger blocks at the bottom of the page.text into a visual means of representation that was wholly divorced from conveying the actual content of the conversations. By dissociating the meaning from the words, I was able to create a map of the mannerism, nature and ultimately idiosyncrasies of my relationship with ‘friend’.

...This work functions as a language-generated color-field-esque abstract painting, drawing on markmaking in the most visceral form to decontextualize the relationship between ‘friend’ and myself... by providing an index on the back of the painting, I leave the painting open to translation but in a deliberately inaccessible manner...the viewer is encouraged to merely meditate in the visual translation of interpersonal connection. It is not the message actually being transcribed that is important, but rather the rhythm of familiarity between two individuals.