WILLA COX

Working with multiple panels has fascinated me since my graduate school days, when I fell in love with the work of Joan Mitchell. My fascination grew as I also came to love Japanese folding screens. I enjoy the challenge of creating individual panels that stand as compositions on their own and also relate to their adjacent panels in a variety of ways, creating a balance of flow and surprise.

In my new body of work, Abstract Narratives, I increased the number of panels from three or four (as I have often used in the past) to fourteen. Working across fourteen panels gives me the opportunity to make many shifts, for example: near to intermediate to distant spaces; subject matter to a lack of subject matter; light to dark; and black and white to color.

I make the panels by cutting up works on paper that I had previously made using monotype, marbling, watercolor, and acrylic gouache. Sometimes the cutting is random, sometimes I select a particular composition. Each panel is 4-1/2 x 2-3/4 inches, the smallest size I have ever worked in. I am often surprised and delighted by how much space can be implied within a very small area.

I generally begin with a single panel that evokes a remembered or imagined landscape. Then I look for other panels which suggest ways in which that landscape might appear at different times of day or in different seasons; or if it was seen from different vantage points; or if one traveled to, through, or beyond it. I develop the fourteen panels with acrylic gouache to enhance the flow through the sequence, often switching panels in and out as my work continues. I always remain open to exploring unexpected developments as they occur. Some of the completed sequences are framed, for immediate panoramic impact. Others are bound into handmade accordion-style books, for more intimate hand-held viewing.

My idea of these sequences being narratives comes from the continuous evolution from the first panel through the fourteenth. I feel I am telling a story, but instead of there being characters who act, there are attributes of painting, drawing, and printmaking that interact and evolve.

~Willa Cox

see Cox’s artist page here