Megan Irving - Trimmed Fat
May 7th - July 7th 2005

My Fat Trimming Train of Thought
This body of work was made like a meal. It's the kind of meal that happens when what little is in the cupboard is scraped together and a delicious dinner is put on the table. They reflect my interest in nature, animals, science, domesticity and storytelling. These are my stone soup paintings; they were made from scraps and became something whole.
To make new paintings from old I began by resurfacing stacks of failed paintings. Throughout the process I maintained some pieces of the textures and colors from the old paintings visible and influencing the new paintings. Because of this process of readdressing old work and keeping some leftovers, either of the best parts or the worst, I began thinking a lot about pieces of paintings. There are always pieces that "work" and those that don't. Good paintings have an overall sense of "working", bad paintings very often have a few good pieces.

The new paintings themselves are of pieces of organisms, earth, stories and scenes consuming the residue of the past layers. They have parts of beasts interacting in them but the whole picture isn't there. You can't tell who's eating who or what size the organism is in relation to its environment or even if it is a beast, pattern or plant. Eventually this led me rip paintings up to see chosen pieces completely separated from the original painting. Like bugs in bottles they were cut off from their own world and as a result their purpose, function, or meaning was changed. From these piles of ripped up paintings I made about fifty new paintings all the while trying to paint only parts of things and scenes on the already detached pieces of canvas. This gives the impression that the image may have been blown up artificially or that the borders are imposed on it and not original to it. Like the flattened view of something through the lenses of binoculars, a camera, or microscope, there is no way to see the whole thing at once when using the lens. At the same time it is not possible to see it as it is through the lens without that lens. If everything is blown up or the view is somehow limited the details become important but the overall context is not as important because it just isn't visible. It is a funny combination of the very vague and the very specific really being the same thing. With this in mind I felt I had to make the bits decorative and richly pretty. The animals are layered with scales and pointed teeth, the plants are outlined and illustrative. When you look through a microscope to identify some living thing it is back lit, glowing and outlined. It has no environment it is suspended and the point of looking at it can get lost for the simple fact that it is a beautiful construction. Often the function of what you are looking at is a forced thought because the function is not nearly as visible as the form.

It was pure indulgence to make these paintings. In the process of science there is little focus on the raw beauty of what you are observing. In the process of being a serious painter impulse is edited. Like a child I allowed decadence to pass through unedited into these paintings. They are needlessly pretty and fantastical. They are the fat on a roast. They are the richest part that is the trimmed off and wasted. This is a show of the waste, the edited, the overlooked details made into a heavy stock.

Megan Irving
Spring 2005