Andrea Higgins: Appearance
GoFukakusa took special pains with his costume. He wore a yellow informal robe lined in green, with a design of burnet flowers worked into it, over a light violet gown bearing gentian flower crests. His light violet trousers were lined in green, and everything was carefully scented. – The Confessions of Lady Nijo
For Andrea Higgins, textiles represent a fundamental aspect of the aesthetics of a society and a style of dress can be as evocative as the representation of a face. For nearly ten years she has painted conceptual “portraits” by representing people as textiles from their wardrobes. The paintings are optical, abstract compositions. Every fiber is represented by a brush stroke and each stroke is built up, one color upon another, layer over layer, to create a three-dimensional mark. In a sense, the images are woven of paint.
Higgins has painted the glen-plaids, tweeds and herringbones worn by her grandmother and the moires and nubby Chanel weaves worn by the wives of American Presidents. Her current series of “portraits” are based on characters from books ranging from Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to the thirteenth-century memoir The Confessions of Lady Nijo.
In the process of painting hundreds of thousands of marks representing threads in a piece of cloth, Higgins began thinking about the objects that appear in traditional portraiture – carefully selected to represent the pursuits and interests of the sitter as well as their social status and aspirations. Specifically, Higgins became fascinated by a passage in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in which Gray is handed “a pile of letters, on a small tray of old Sevres china” by his valet. Wilde knew that an “old” or “soft paste” piece of porcelain would evidence Dorian’s sophistication, taste and financial wherewithal. In addition to the fabric swatch paintings Higgins is known for, this exhibition will include paintings representing seventeenth-century painting on porcelain, adding depth and complexity to her characters’ depictions.
