“I
don’t think about it, I just go for it.”
--Ashley Dequilla Black
I shared a class
with fellow William & Mary student Ashley Dequilla in 2007.
Under the tutelage of Professor Brian Kreydatus, we holed up together in
the Matoaka Art Studio from winter until spring, our hands silver with lead as
we toiled away at Life Drawing II. That semester,
the picturesque location on the lake was worth the windy walks from Old Campus,
and three-hour studio sessions with live models, accompanied by George Harrison
on a cassette player, lead to some of my best student work. Then I graduated. I lost touch with Ashley, despite our
camaraderie through critiques at Matoaka, though I remained wistful of those
long afternoons and evenings on the lake.
In the decade since
our shared studio experience, Ashley and I both maintained our respective
artistic practices. Ashley’s art career
has included several exhibitions and a significant portfolio of artwork dealing
with themes of re-indigenization and exploration of her Filipino heritage. My own artistic practice lead me to use
clothing as my canvas, creating wearable art inspired by modern and
contemporary art masterpieces; ultimately establishing my website and clothing
line, Artfully Awear.
When we reconnected
recently via social media, Ashley and I discovered an affinity to each other’s
work, and bonded over the struggles and triumphs of developing and maintaining
an art career. I was intrigued by the
issues she explores through her painting, and she was interested in the way
that I use clothing to examine and understand the meaning of art. In a Facebook message, she attached an image
of one of her works, a large-scale painting entitled Psyche, and asked if I’d be interested in creating a garment
inspired by the work. I immediately noticed something exciting in the piece –
the gestural abstraction and color palette caught my eye, and I had so many
questions about her process. We agreed
to collaborate, and I began the process of creating a dress inspired by her
painting.
Understanding the
artists’ processes and inspirations is the most important part of what I do
through Artfully Awear. Making my own garment inspired by a work of art is the
ultimate learning experience – to put myself into the mind of the artist and
figure out how it was made gives me a very deep understanding of his or her
challenges and how they were overcome.
In a long conversation with Ashley, we delved into the meaning behind
her work, and I began to understand and appreciate it much more deeply.
Black is based just
outside of Washington, DC, where she has been expanding her artistic practice
over the past several years. Of her work, she says, “I think of painting as an
alchemical practice—meditative—mixing ingredients and components which becomes
a tangible spiritual practice and release.”
The convergence of many disparate elements is evident in her work, where
the palette and subject matter run the gamut, referencing Mexican Renaissance
painting, German Abstract Expressionism, and Neoclassical Baroque Renaissance
painting. Her work is a hybrid of elements taken from all of her inspirations,
with their own underlying themes: complex mythologies, the exploration of
archetypes, religion, witchcraft, and the work of Carl Jung. In the particular work I was studying, Psyche, Black explored the marriage of
figurative work and abstraction—striving for inhibition through her
process. Of her vibrant color palette,
she says, “Whimsy informs my palette choices.
I don’t think about it, I just go for it.” You can truly feel this urgency in her work,
as she explores themes related to gender and cultural heritage.
I created the dress
inspired by Psyche from my own studio
in Brooklyn, NY. While I was working on it,
I sent photos to her so she could see the process and provide input. Her advice: “allow the final mark-making to
be entirely random.” Inhibition isn’t something
that I explore as much in my work; fabric is less forgiving, and, similar to
watercolor, each mark is permanent. But once I started to get into the rhythm
of painting in Ashley’s style, I realized that it was absolutely necessary to
release control in order to obtain the essence of her work. That lesson was the most valuable part of
this project for me, useful in life as in art – learning to let go and allow
the work to grow, uninhibited.
When the dress was
finished, I packed it up and traveled from New York City to Washington, DC, to
solidify the reconnection between Ashley and myself and between our work. Over black coffee, she and I talked through
the process and connected over some of our similar struggles. Then we took some photos of the two pieces
together, and of us, recording this collaboration that began a decade ago at
Lake Matoaka. In many ways, it felt like
a homecoming – the two of us, nearly a decade after our William & Mary art
classes, collaborating once again. Auspiciously,
we’ve learned a few things along the way, such as the value of releasing your
inhibitions and letting your creative spark guide you.
