I am so honored to have been selected to participate in the Marblehead Arts Association’s Annual Juried Show to be held February, 8th 2020 through March, 8th 2020. If you haven’t done so already please swing by to experience my work Baroque Chicken Meets the History of Drapery Painting alongside the work of my accomplished artistic peers.
You may be wondering, “Hey Isabella, What is up with that title??? What does it mean?” Or as a former-professor once pointed out, “Those aren’t even chickens! They’re roosters!”
Like many things in life, this one is a long story…perhaps we should start at the beginning?
While working on my senior thesis at Wellesley, I became obsessed curtains, especially pre-owned curtains found in thrift stores. Curtains, to me, have always been strange, somewhat foreign objects. The house I grew up in was a dilapidated, yet starkly designed mid-century modern home with large picture windows and my father believed it was a high crime to cover them. He loved the way you could almost forget you were inside by gazing through the glass. Even in the dead of winter, when those single pain windows created a frigged draft, he would not allow curtains. He simply loved his tree house and I loved it too.
Many of my friends who visited, however, did not. They were afraid of the dark silent trees swaying gently beyond the glass. They felt vulnerable and exposed in a way I didn’t understand at the time. It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized the important role that curtains play as a divider between your private, personal space and the outside world. I realized that my dorm room needed curtains, not only to conceal me from the campus’s gaze, but to add some life to the otherwise bare and impersonal while walls and generic wood furniture.
Armed with a minimal budget I ventured to the local thrift store where I was amazed by the wide array of fabrics and patterns in the curtain. It struck me, that every single one of these curtains had been chosen by someone to adorn their domestic space before being ultimately discarded. I wondered at my own assumptions about the kind of person who owned them.
Three years later, as a senior beginning my honors thesis I found myself again and again returning to themes of decoration, the domestic space, pattern and identity production. I once again found myself in the curtain aisle of my local thrift store.
On one visit I came across a curtain unlike any that I had seen at that store before. It’s columns of regal roosters nestled in wreaths reminded me of the antiquated charm of my grandmother’s house decorated with various rooster trinkets. As I looked closer I noticed the way this printed piece of fabric had been designed to mimic the look of hand-worked embroidery and cross-stitching. The more I stared at this pattern the more I was reminded me of the McMansions midwest-baroque sensibility I often saw growing up in Ohio. The whole thing was so ridiculous—comical even, but I loved it.
Back in my studio, I hung the curtain up against the wall and marveled at the pattern. I tried to picture the house it used to hang in and the people who lived there. I tried to imagine was residual memory this pattern held for those that used it to adorn their spaces. When they thought of their mother, grandmother or neighbor did this pattern float across their mind’s eye?
As I began painting I found myself adopting a heavy, exaggerated style. Although suspended in the pattern, the fabric I depicted felt solid like the fabric depicted in early Renaissance paintings. The painting, to me, was a study in the ridiculous and the sentimental. It was an effort to understand through humor and I believe the name reflects that.
With only two days left to view ‘Variations’ at the Marblehead Arts Association in scenic Marblehead, Massachusetts, it’s time to hurry over if you haven’t already had the chance!
Baroque Chicken Meets The History of Drapery Painting—Isabella King
Marblehead Arts Association, Marblehead MA