Carol Dickerson - Tapestries and Looking Sideways

Carol Dickerson - Tapestries and Looking Sideways
“Maybe the desire to make something beautiful Is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” -from Mary Oliver’s poem “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses” Tapestries - Experimenting in Paint My paintings are all experiments. What if? What if I just staple this big piece of raw canvas to my studio wall? What if I mix charcoal lines into acrylic paint? What if I just make everything wet and let it drip? What if I combine these unusual colors? What a mess!!! Then the process of covering and uncovering, addition and subtraction, over and over again as I seek a resolution of the problems I have created. I am never sure where I will end up but at some point it begins to please me, some combination of color, shapes, texture, and line that I am drawn to. Looking Sideways - Collage Collage is very different from painting. There is the ongoing collection of fabric scraps, papers, string and other interesting junk. I enjoy the playful process of selecting and laying out pieces and moving them around to create a compelling design. Even with a plan there is always an element of surprise in the process once I begin gluing pieces in place: some materials become translucent, revealing unexpected ghost images. Overlays create new textures. Several years ago someone recommended “The Art of Looking Sideways”, a book by the British graphic designer Alan Fletcher (1931-2006). When it arrived I was confounded by it. An enormous compendium of Fletcher’s observations on design and visual learning, company logos, and graphics, it cannot be “read” in any conventional way, and it was so heavily saturated with ink that it smelled bad. I put it aside for several years and when I picked it up again, I discovered a rich source of graphics and quirky humor. I started cutting it up. Some of the bits and pieces ended up in this collection of collages. I have since learned that it took Fletcher eighteen years to assemble the book. I don’t think he would mind this “sampling”, as his book is a sampling of his own and others graphic work and musings. ( I bought another copy of the book which I now enjoy. )

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