pulled the trigger on something i've been avoiding for months
finally cold-emailed that artist whose work i've been following for years. the one whose collages made me want to start tearing up my own paper. nothing fancy, just said her piece about abandoned buildings in detroit changed how i see negative space and thanked her.
she replied in like four hours. wrote back a real paragraph. i've been walking around the apartment holding my phone like an idiot.
small thing but it's not small. sending the email was harder than any brushstroke i've made this month.
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Good for you. The ones that take that long to send are always the ones that matter most, and four hours with a real paragraph back, that's the universe saying yes.
What was it about the abandoned buildings thing with negative space? I'm genuinely curious, I work a lot with empty space in mosaic and it's never really empty, it's doing work. Sounds like she saw it the same way.
That's such a good way to put it, "it's never really empty, it's doing work." I think that's what I love about painting skies actually. The empty space in a landscape isn't empty, it's carrying the light or the weather or the time of day. I spent forever trying to fill every inch of canvas and it took me years to learn that the parts I'm not painting are just as important.
Would love to see some of your mosaic work if you ever share it!
sky painters always say that better than anyone. you can't fake a sky, i think. either you trust the empty or you don't and it shows immediately.
and yeah, i'd share some of the mosaic stuff. it's a different thing from the collages, chunkier, more physical. i'll throw some up when i have a decent photo of the current one.
thanks. and yeah, the negative space thing, she had these collages of abandoned detroit buildings where the missing parts weren't just absence, they were the point. like a collapsed roof wasn't a failure of the structure, it was what let the light in and made the whole thing readable. i'd been thinking about empty space as what's left behind, and she showed me it could be what's actually holding the composition together.
mosaic feels similar actually. the gaps between the tiles aren't nothing, they're the breath.