March 2023: Janine Etherington

In the summer of 2019, I started experimenting with laying single colors of paint on small blank canvases. The activity, centered on the action of spreading paint and color without any real thought or discernment, was very meditative and grounding. As the stack of these canvases grew so did my curiosity about how they related to each other. Light sifting into the studio onto these small blocks of color created new shapes and tints in their shadows and prompted more combining and recombining of these compact elements. Stacking and tilting them woke up my childhood love of geometry as triangles and parallelograms appeared.Perspective, relationship, and trompe l’oeil engage my curiosity and drive my work. An ongoing interaction between an arrangement of wood elements and angles of light fuels a cycle of invention and reinvention. I use stain to augment the wood grain and let it come forward. As a result, the work feels like a collaboration with nature and gives me the opportunity to explore the patterns, rhythms, and forms that the wood contains. My recent work develops intuitively, helped along by the endless possibilities in orienting the square panels. OnceI've settled on an orientation, I return to the assemblage as a whole and go back in with new lines.