From "Stones" to "Holiness"
In the last two months, I've spent a lot of time in my basement wet studio, dyeing many gradations of different grays. After the first set of gradations, which went from dark gray to very light, I found myself especially drawn to the very lightest of values. (The photo above shows scraps from the fabrics that were eventually cut into blocks.) So, already having narrowed from a palette of neutral stone colors to gray, I found myself narrowing it further to very pale grays. This inclination of my eye and heart led me to an understanding/decision about the aspect of the subject--stones--that I was moving into: the quality of holiness. The original commitment to stones as a subject goes back to the experience of the Jewish practice of leaving small stones on a grave. I've thought about why one would leave a token of a visit, and why stones serve so well as such a token. I've been drawing stone shapes for many years now, thinking that the beaut...