David Fratkin
“My paintings are ornamented skins peeled up from plate glass. For many years I have been interested in pattern as both orderly, rational system and, paradoxically, a means to ecstatic contemplation, the visual equivalent of chant or prayer. I begin with printed images of patterned skins - tattoos and architectural ornament - and alter these on xerox machine and computer. The resulting mechanically created designs are then carved into rubber blocks that serve as tools for the hand guided by intuition and accident.
The technique I use, a hybrid of painting and printmaking, creates both dimensionality and luminosity. These qualities transform what began as flat patterning into something both tangible and unknown.The surfaces that result from this reverse painting process feel both delicately intimate and vertiginously distant. A maplike quality often results, continuing the interplay of systematic and intuitive.”
