I did it! Finally! After a solid month and a half in my studio I’ve finished my second knitted canvas.
I’m particularly excited about this because I decided in the spring of 2011, when I was working on my senior show, that my first out of school series would be my knitted canvasses. It was during that spring that I completed my first knitted canvas, which was meant to be a simply study.
But between finding an actual place to do art consistently, knitting a lot, and going through my entire painting process, I haven’t made any headway into my new series until now.
I decided to do knitted canvasses because I like to walk across, and on, boundaries. I’ve done crafts my whole life, from making candles to knitting to sewing, and I’ve spent a good amount of time in the past five years focusing on my painting. Putting the two together just made sense.
I got the idea because as I was working on my senior project I moved from regular sized stretched canvasses to large-scale (8’x7′) unstretched canvasses. When I was painting on the unstretched canvasses I realized that they were just fabric. I also paid close attention to the texture in the canvas itself and in the paint that I put on the canvas.
Around the same time I was experimenting with different patterns for knitting and I realized that the patterns I was discovering would be incredibly interesting textures in a painting. If you ask me for an art school definition, I would say that I combined the male-dominated high art form of abstract oil painting with the female-dominated craft of knitting by having the textures of the knitting affect the patterns of the paint.
The art school reason is definitely true, I was paying attention to gender divisions as well as form divisions in art. But, on the other side, it’s fun and new!