Patterns
Creatively, I've been mulling over patterns. Literal and physical patterns in our environment, such as architecture, wallpaper, row crops, as well as cultural patterns. How single motifs or behaviors add up in meaningful ways over the course of a lifetime of a person or a landscape or a community. How we repeat the same societal patterns over and over and over until they become calcified habits in our communities, no matter the cost or damage.
And how change - good and bad - happens in spite of all that.
(You know. Breezy stuff.)
The finished piece.
Jennifer Drinkwater. You’ll Always Have Christmas Presents, acrylic on wood, 24” x 36”, 2022. Sold. Now available as a limited edition print.
All these images are the various stages that show up on the easel.
They start out simple enough. I wanted to be a bit more deliberate in the underpainting instead of just slopping color everywhere.
This reminded me of enthusiastic wallpaper. And yes, that's gold.
Evolution. An underpainting for a landscape painting of a Mississippi Delta farm.
I located an architectural element from a building on the property (see below), repeated it, adding windows for visual interest. Gold + Silver.
The final painting.
Jennifer Drinkwater, Five Days Gone, acrylic on wood panel, 24” x 24”, 2022. Sold. Now available as a limited edition print.
And then there’s the Big Muddy. We received a framed Fisk map of the Mississippi River as a wedding gift, and it’s one of my most prized possessions.
If you’re unfamiliar, Howard Fisk was a geographer and cartographer for the US Army Corps of Engineers who created these maps of the lower Mississippi River to capture its ever-shifting quality and effect on the surrounding alluvial plain.
Exquisite doesn’t quite capture it, right?
And the hilarious part is that Fisk apparently created these to add a little visual interest to an otherwise dull-as-dishwater government memo entitled “The Nature and Origin of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River.” The colors signify pathways that the Mighty Miss took in previous centuries.
I see this image dozens of times a day, so naturally it seeps in.
And seems fitting to create two paintings of two sites in the Mississippi Deltas, one in Sharkey County, an area devastated by flooding in 2019…
and the other alongside the River just outside of Greenville, Mississippi.
The benefit of going through the slog of painting these patterns that will be 70% covered up is meditative. It gets me in the mindset of making a new piece. Kind of like stretching.
There’s no hard and fast rule to how much of the underlying pattern remains visible and what disappears. It depends on the painting and how it all fits together.
I intend for a decent amount to shine through, particularly if there’s a literal element to it (like a window or a morning glory), but sometimes you’ve got to take a kill your darlings, so to speak.
The pattern underneath Seed Savers, which is a nod to the very first heirloom seeds that ounder Diane Ott Whealy began to save through the Seed Savers Exchange in 1975 - her Grandpa Ott’s morning glory seeds. Check out the evolution of the painting here.