Gregory Dickson

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Artist Statment:
The thread paintings originated from the floor of my fashion sewing studio. Over time, as I worked with a variety of fabric and thread colors, I watched the slow progression of multi-layered levels of scrap thread accumulate beneath my sewing machine. I began to see the possibility of manipulating thread into amorphic shapes and patterns, to achieve this "static tension" I was witnessing, this movement without direction, within the confines of a canvas field. The ground of the paintings are often painted to appear infinite and borderless; the thread then floats within its given atmosphere, a snapshot of time as the thread is suspended in endless space. Using the thread as a linear medium allows me to work with established lines to achieve depth and layering, as the thread is always the same width along its determined length. I may cut the threads in lengths and lay them down individually. I may gather threads up in a box and mangle them together, only to pull and unravel them from their knotted form just before applying them to the canvas, until a saturation of thread color is evident in the painting. Each painting teaches me a new technique for
manipulating the thread.

I choose to work with thread because of the familiarity I have with it as a construction medium for clothing, a utilitarian raw material to turn
two-dimensional fabric into a three-dimensional garment. The myriad of thread colors, their inherent linear nature, and their reaction to the clear
adherent medium have given my threads a different type of life than I had previously given them, and the more I work with them, the more they work back to me. Rather than decide a color and position and just paint a line, I choose thread color and let the threads decide how they will eventually position themselves. Of course I have intentions as to how I would like the final composition to reveal itself, but often the most successful results are achieved when I restrain my desires to control the painting, and let the threads reveal to me how they would like to be permanently adhered to the canvas.

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