HEATHER BAUSE RUBINSTEIN

Recently, I have been making gestural paintings with oil on canvas, while still making paintings in old wall sample books and on found bed sheets and table cloths. I still make stitched painting — using remnants and fragments from my looser, more gestural abstraction paintings— often landscape inspired recto-verso paintings, but these days I'm making more direct works on textiles. In many ways, I have moved away from paintings structured by pattern, and found myself drawn to more complexity, a greater number of parts, a more relational language. I still rely on, and reuse found fabrics (bedsheets, duvets, crochets, 1960-70s women’s business jackets, all scavenged from thrift stores), but in these “post-pattern” paintings, it’s no longer about regularly repeating motifs. I still value Pattern and Decoration; and Support/Surface—Alberto Burri, Simon Hantai—but I’ve also been looking at Vuillard, Bonnard, Mitchell, Twombly and Rauschenberg, and reconnecting with 1950s Ab Ex and Informel painting. I’m assimilating painted passages and found fabrics, recto and verso surfaces, paintbrush and sewing machine. The process of making these paintings is much slower, which I hope translates into longer looking.