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Artist Statement
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Brief History
The larger of my works, roughly 40” square, have always involved many, many
layers of resin and pigment over dense and detailed infrastructure. These
layers are meant to
 suggest
light shining through air or water, with flowers or other small evanescent
things such as celestial forms floating on the surface. I used to begin by
drawing maps of places important to me, and lists of place names from my own
past, which formed an intricate web upon which I built layers of paint that
gradually obscured the details. Now these larger paintings often include
underlying grids that cite places upon which I superimpose hundreds of
circles, cut from the old books as well as contemporary magazines, arranged
in such a way that they look like floating planets receding into space.
The final work looks like this:
 I’ve
been using very old school text books [turn of the 20th Century or earlier]
in my work for some time now. I started out clipping old maps and
illustrations from the books for collages. I combined these archival
ephemera with various materials -- old wallpaper, mica, birch bark, flowers
and leaves, metal leaf, and documents such as letters and stamps – with my
own fairly realistic landscapes that were meant to signify
a
particular place and time. The small landscapes,
 when most successful,
seemed almost imaginary or other-worldly because I was applying layers of
resin and pigment over them as I always have done in my work. But since I
was “framing” these images with the archival materials, rather than focusing
on the materials for their own sake, I moved away from these early, rather
formal painted collages.
At this point I began
to create intricately gridded surfaces with small square fragments of the
materials I had been using more formally. I found it dazzling to
de-construct and randomly rearrange a
 combination
of things – the old books, the mica and metals, the bark and flowers. These
small pieces were a major departure into complete abstraction. I could mix
together maps and images from disparate parts of the globe, thus collapsing
space; by fragmenting and recombining old detritus I could collapse time. I
also liked the rather painstaking process – it seemed to be a form of
homage.
I soon became more
intrigued by, and attached to, the little marks and notes children made in
these old books, as well as the inadvertent ink blots, food and drink
stains, pressed flowers and just overall wear and tear as the books got
used. I think in many cases books made their way into the hands of many
children over the years – so the books were not permanently owned by a
child, just “visited” for a time. But long enough to leave marks or traces,
which I found eminently worth preserving. Once I focused on the children –
the previous owners or readers of the books – all else paled by
comparison. It moved the preoccupation from the general – old printed
material – to the specific – one volume marked by a real child who I lived
so long ago that they are undoubtedly dead now. Over the years my own work
has evolved in direct response to the children’s traces. I started out by
cutting all marks into uniform ½ inch squares and arranging them randomly in
a rich abstract grid. These early pieces nonetheless contained
still-recognizable elements that I began to treasure – curlicue initials,
coin rubbings, little sketches of people and animals.
I then reached a point
when I could no longer cut into a complete image – there were too many worth
preserving in their entirety. That’s when I began to build paintings upon
the documents kept whole. The
layers of resin and paint that I added over the original documents gave them
a kind of hazy or other-worldly feel – as though viewed through the mists of
time and memory. I then felt I had hit upon the key to continuing. I was
able to combine my personal aesthetic – layers of atmosphere that allowed
light to glimmer through while also revealing some of the original
children’s documents. Atop the last layer I add what I think of as “gifts”
to the children – to date mostly floating flowers, small ribbons or toys.
 Finally, a series I
have only just begun involves leaving “gifts” of pure colored forms on whole
pages or covers of the old books. These are the most minimal things I have
done to date,
and
I have no idea where they are going. They showcase what the child has
written or drawn; my additions are incidental. The pages themselves are not
preserved in layers of resin, as in my other work – they are fragile and
need to be displayed in Riker mounts, like specimens.
Where I Am Today
My process is to lose
myself, literally, in my work. That is to say, I try to let ideas flow [or
tumble] to me, and I try not to determine outcomes. I focus on what is
already there, particularly the found, the random and the mundane. The
issue of old things, however – what used to be here but has now disappeared
– serves only as a counterpoint. It is a reminder that one thing is no more,
or less, important than another. If a viewer perceives some element of
memory or nostalgia, or longing, or loss, I can acknowledge that, but if I
were in truth honoring my own personal memories and nostalgic issues I would
do the work very differently. Or I would not do it at all. I myself feel as
though I am shrinking – disappearing – and that means many things; losing
myself in the work itself, and also shedding any sense of self-importance.
The paintings have
gotten progressively smaller in scale, and briefer in message to the point
of possibly lacking meaning at all. I would like to think that they hint at
meaning while also eluding interpretation. Any attempt at a grand gesture,
at this point, would not express how I feel or how I would objectively rate
my own importance in the scheme of things. I feel disconnected from the
image of de Kooning, for example, cutting large painterly swaths across a
huge canvas. I can offer a form of homage by engaging in repetition and
futile, labor-intensive tasks. And as long as the end result signifies
nothing more than an objective record or trace of the activity, I am
satisfied. That is why I try to preserve little sketches and markings or
graffiti of children who lived in another century. And that is why the
flowers, ribbons, toys, animals and other carefully rendered signifiers are
my own gifts to the children – the equivalent of flowers placed in homage at
a sacred site. The lives of these children are as significant, as worthy of
preservation, as anyone’s, and my life is just as meaningfully engaged in
preservation of the work of others as it is in creating work all my own.
If my work is a statement about myself, then it is a record of my own
insignificance and eventual disappearance. If contemplating reduction to
nothingness is the sublime, then so be it.
Jean Hess
Knoxville July 3, 2007
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