Wool is one of six large-scale color field paintings by Felicia van Bork in NC Women Abstract Painters. In this work five horizontal skeins of color are stacked in the center of the painting and fill its white ground. Using her gloved hands as a stylus, Van Bork applies paint directly to the canvas, entwining tendrils of Prussian blue and cool grey with warmer hints of rose. Neighboring color zones respond to each other, growing nearer and receding.  Like low hanging clouds moving across a landscape they invite meditation and like the painting’s title evoke notions of comfort and resilience through the illusion of painterly space.  

 “The Radical Tenderness series of paintings grew out of my Color Grid series of oil pastel pictures of observed color relationships. My personal response to colors is sympathetic: the more I study color, the more I see colors as personalities that resonate with each other. I’m experimenting with all sorts of combinations and types of contrast, and learning to identify the groupings that best express my evolving idea of beauty.” 

Born in Toronto, Canada, Felicia completed her undergraduate studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and earned her MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA. In the summer of 2017, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her work is widely collected in the United States and Canada including the permanent collection of the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC.

INTERVIEW WITH FELICIA VAN BORK

Radical Tenderness

Felicia van Bork and Edie Carpenter

Can you tell us why you called your new series of paintings Radical Tenderness?

The Radical Tenderness series of paintings grew out of my Color Grid series of oil pastel pictures of observed color relationships. My personal response to colors is sympathetic: the more I study color, the more I see colors as personalities that resonate with each other.

How do you choose what work moves from a study to a large painting?

I’m experimenting with all sorts of combinations and types of contrast, and learning to identify the groupings that best express my evolving idea of beauty. I often start with oil pastels and little scraps of paper (pages from drafts of my husband’s novel and poems, torn into quarters). On the back of one of these scraps, I draw a stack of five bars of mixed color. Sometimes the colors are of things I can see, like the hues in peach juice on a white paper napkin. If the grouping give me a feeling of longing, like the longing for home, then I make a little painting based on it. The oil paint gives me richer color than the pastels can. Increasingly, I skip the oil pastels and begin with  the little painting. If it, in turn, gives me the right feeling, I make a big painting based on it. Each step opens up different possibilities of color, scale, mark-making and composition. Speaking of composition, I deliberately limited myself to five horizontal bars because I like the way five colors work together, and because I wanted very subtle relationships to have a chance to be the dominant compositional factor. This is where the series title, Radical Tenderness, comes in.

Your color relationships, suggest analogies with music bringing to mind recent posts of orchestras with members playing in sync yet separated in space?

The paintings, when grouped together, speak to each other, as all grouped objects do. But the repeated format (five bars, in this case) particularly leads the viewer to notice “rhymes” between paintings. This affinity is so interesting to me. If I can make groups of individual paintings that actively converse with each other, they set up layers upon layers of harmonies. The rhymes reveal more of themselves the longer the installation of works is viewed. I’ve found that the dynamic happens only if the color relationships are subtle. There can be very bold value contrasts but if the colors in a painting are crass, the painting will fail to relate to the others. Each canvas must be like a richly developed character that forms particular bonds with every other member of the group, so that together they make a polyphonic chorus.

I believe I must be painting this way because I am in revolt against the unconsidered opinions expressed by people in the news these days. There is an aching need for empathy and tenderness in the world and I am teaching myself these things as fast as I can.