About the work

This original collage made of my hand painted papers is inspired by the landscape abstraction in the work of Richard Diebenkorn. As an artist interested in the language of abstraction, I look to other artists work to think about how I can turn landscapes into fields of color. I thought a lot about texture and color when making this piece. I painted a lot of papers in blues and neutrals and then cut and constructed this collage in layers, thinking about the weight of the sky and the lightness of the earth. I grew up going to museums with my mom. My mom wasn’t an artist but loved art and deeply loved looking at and talking about art with me. She was my first art teacher. When I was 11 years old, there was a solo show of Richard Diebenkorn’s painting at SFMOMA and seeing his flattened landscapes and blocks of color really stuck with me. I remember that my mom really loved the Ocean Park series. All through high school and college I kept a postcard of “Ocean Park #54” on my wall. And whenever I see a Diebenkorn painting in a museum collection, it always feels like running into a friend. Last year I saw a show at a gallery that included many of Diebenkorn’s collages that I had never seen before. I didn’t actually know that he made preparatory studies in collage and had never seen up close how he worked out color and composition with painted paper. I had not until this moment realized that his visual language was in fact the same as mine. But even though my medium is also painted paper collage, I had never tried making my own flattened, abstract landscape in Diebenkorn’s style. I went back and studied his work, his use of color, the feel of the paint. This piece of mine, “The Weight of the Sky,” is inspired by Diebenkorn’s stacking of colors and textures, but my own take on building a landscape with painted paper from the sky down; letting the weight of the sky be held by the bands of green and rose and brown (the trees) and sinking down into the white and gray air.