New Page — Felicia van Bork

Paintings and collages by Felicia van Bork

Artist Statement

I am best known for my How To series and my Color Grids, two related bodies of work. The first

is a series of over 150 abstract collages made from pieces of my monotype prints, and the

second is a series of nearly 300 abstract oil pastel drawings and oil paintings of observed color

relationships. I make collages to learn about the meaning-making possibilities of pictorial

composition and Color Grids to learn about the meaning-making possibilities of color

relationships. For me, the two types of work inform each other. One thing they have in

common is the way certain colors, placed next to each other, generate emotionally evocative

illusionistic space.

Oil pastel is a convenient and beautiful medium for sketchbook work, but oil paint lets me

explore a larger canvas and greater depths of luminosity, texture and value. The sketchbook

drawings become starting points for playful experimentation as I seek to get closer and closer

to expressing my most and least individual self. Like my pastel Color Grids, my Color Grid

paintings are at once entirely non-figurative and completely representational: they can be seen

as bars of color and they can also be understood as structural corners in light and shadow.

My first live-action film, The Color Grid Movie, is a 1.5 hour meditation on creativity using the

images and captions in my Color Grid Sketchbooks. This movie project has shown me that even

when I am trying to be completely objective, I leave my imprint and that of the spirit of the

times on everything I make.

In 2018, I began a new series, the Little Box collages, which are pictures

derived from my idiosyncratic architectural models. The near hyper-realism of these recent

collages, which often include windows to the sky, further explores the volumetric space that

intrigued me in my previous series.