Spontaneous Colleen

Thought I'd share some details of my fellow artists work in the Spontaneous Repetition show, starting with Colleen McCubbin Stepanic. Colleen has an MFA in painting from Tyler, and is currently teaching basic design to Temple undergrads. She's a prolific painter, and when I first met her she'd just moved into a basement studio at the Crane building. Challenged by the lack of space and the need to keep her paintings off the sometimes flooded floor, she resorted to taking some of her canvases off the stretchers. I believe this sparked a recognition of the fabricness of paintings, and their potential for sculptural qualities.Many of those paintings became a renewed resource for her current body of work. Cut up, stitched back together, they become greatly abstracted from their original existences, yet a remnant of the content remains. They're reincarnated, but have old souls. I love the hanging threads in this one above. There's such complex color as paint seeps through canvas, or canvas is painted on both sides.

The works in this exhibit have a very organic feel to them. I like how she's used painted lines over the stitched canvas to reunite the surface and bring back some of the painting/layered quality she used in her previous, flatter work. Colleen has a solo exhibit entitled "Home" opening at the Painted Bride on First Friday, where she'll be showing her more architectural pieces.