Now that I have been cooking, cleaning and raising kids alone for five years, I have come to question these gender-based assignments. I also question what it means to my masculinity if I perform the tasks typically assigned to my mate. Can I nurture my children sufficiently or do they require a feminine parental influence by nature? What is women’s work and why is it assigned in such a way? Does women’s work have to be accomplished by a woman in order to be effective?
In the art world, women were not taken seriously until the end of the last century. They have been relegated to crafts and the domestic arts such as quilting, weaving and cooking. My series titled “Women’s Work” focuses on the arts involving fabric. Already involved in collage, I began to develop a body of work that celebrates canvas as a material. Tearing the canvas into strips, just as the quilters of Gees Bend, Alabama tear their materials rather than cutting with tools, has allowed me to appreciate fabric as a metaphor for family, relationships and society. As I weave the painted strips of canvas together to create patterns, I envision the way men and women weave themselves together to create relationships. The overlapping and intertwining of personalities makes us stronger as a group. The masculine and feminine dodge and meet in the fabric of society.
The paintings erase the boundaries between the primitive and the sophisticated revealing innovative ways of looking at fabric, paint, design and format. They are as close to Op Art as they are Folk Art. The picture plane has been re-constructed. With a mature sense of color and a zeal for re-inventing the basics, the works pay homage to traditional women’s tasks. There is a profound sense of comfort, nurture, and generational duty, much like that found in quilts, weaving and pottery. The paintings are objects as much as they are images. The works in this series combine my own experience as a painter with the dual role of mother and father culminating in works that objectify beauty, instinct and gender based affections. I am a man, a father and a painter. I will never state an order of priority, as no answer could ever be correct. The Women’s Work series combines my sense of masculinity and femininity in a gender-neutral representation of what it takes to make a relationship, a family, a community, and a society.
