Meia Glick
b. 1975
B.F.A. 2010 University of Washington, Seattle, WA
b. 1975
B.F.A. 2010 University of Washington, Seattle, WA
I have eaten a lot of cupcakes, a lot of cake and sugar cookies and ice cream. Immersed in cloying sweetness and the sensation of being overstuffed, I feel intoxicated, sleepy, and drugged. The sweetness rises in my body until my head is full of cotton candy, fuzzy and dreamy, less aware of the emotional pain that drove me to indulge.
The perfect frosting-smothered cake entering and filling the mouth with soft and yielding sweetness is a metaphor for nursing at the breast, filling oneself with sweet and nurturing milk, dreamily gazing into a mother’s eyes of love before drifting into the pleasurable oblivion of sleep. This was what I was yearning for and reaching for every time I filled myself with frosting, cookies, cupcakes, and spoonfuls of ice cream: being held, safe and warm, being nurtured and nourished, being loved.
As I’ve gradually learned healthier ways of dealing with painful emotions, the craving for love and nurturance evolved into the culmination of desire, a sense of fulfillment, joy, and satiation. Instead of yearning for love, I poured my own love for others, my own capacity to nurture and nourish, onto the canvas in the form of pink paint.
Why pink? As a synesthetic person, my senses cross a little when it comes to colors. If I close my eyes, nearly every experience, including the tasting of food, matches a corresponding color. Likewise, most colors create a sensation of flavor on my tongue. Pink overwhelms my palate with gorgeous sweetness, and recalls the sensation of filling up with sugar, but without the calories and cavities.
My frosting is either made or bought, and I shape it into large, delicious blobs (yes, a little of it does end up getting eaten). I let the frosting relax into its natural dollopy shape, and sometimes pipe more frosting on top, so that the decoration becomes decorated. The frosting can stand on its own as an ephemeral sculpture, and can also be used as a loose model for painting or collage. The subtle differences in the shadows and highlights on a curl of frosting get me thinking about color and the organic shapes I can make with it. I don’t often try to replicate a frosting gob’s exact design, but let its shape suggest an idea of frosting, something more abstract and vague than, say, an explicit cupcake. I paint using oils, slowly building up from flat yet sensual shapes to thick luscious strokes and blobs. My collage builds up layers of flat shapes, using unique papers, markers, and sparkly pink fingernail polish. The negative spaces of a collage are as important as the positive shapes: I use the leftover scraps of one piece as a springboard for the next. Ideas from frosting sculpture melt into collage, which flows into ideas for painting, and then aspects of that build more ideas for sculpture and collage.
Frosting is leading me into the blur between painting and sculpture, the materiality of paint, the subtlety or garishness of color, and the relationship between art and decoration.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
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2010
2010 2010 |
10 x 10 x 10 x TIETON: Juried Exhibition of Art, Craft, Design, Print, and Architecture, August 1-October 10, Mighty Tieton Warehouse Gallery, Tieton, Washington, juried by Ed Marquand of Marquand Books, Gail Gibson of Gail Gibson Gallery, and Greg Kucera of Greg Kucera Gallery. mightytieton.com
BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS: Painting and Drawing, May 11-22, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, School of Art, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. BFA/BA IN PAINTING AND DRAWING, April 19-May 2, Sandpoint Gallery, School of Art, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. |
