Felicia van Bork
The Color Grid Movie, 2019
Live video, 1.5 hours
Felicia van Bork, art and direction
Daniel Lynds, videography and production
On loan from the Artist
On view in the E. Craig Wall, Jr. Academic Center until April 3rd, 2021.
Please note: All buildings on campus, including the Wall Center, are only open to Davidson students, faculty and staff due to the pandemic.
Artist statement: I use oil pastel, a convenient and beautiful medium, in the Color Grid Sketchbooks, and oil paint to explore a larger canvas and greater depths of luminosity, texture and value. The drawings become starting points for paintings.
My first live-action film, The Color Grid Movie, is a 1.5 hour meditation on creativity. It is my performance of the images and captions in my Color Grid Sketchbooks.
Q&A with the Artist and Gallery Intern Isabel Smith ’24:
Isabel: You have over 300 pieces in your Color Grids series, which you’ve said you created to “learn about the meaning-making possibilities of color relationships.” Can you speak more on that?
Felicia: Yes. My previous series of collages makes meaning primarily from the arrangement of shapes… A narrative is introduced simply by engaging the viewer’s relationship to the illusion of space. In the Color Grid series, I establish a grid-based composition that in itself offers little in the way of intrinsic meaning. That way, I put all of the focus on the colors and the ways in which they relate to each other. A grouping of pale orange bars, all nearly the same but with slight variations in temperature, has a decidedly different mood if the same type of grouping includes one intense color. Suddenly the singular color becomes a protagonist… even if the picture is completely abstract, like the color grids.”
Isabel: How did you put the video together?
Felicia: I put the book on a low table and sat on the floor next to it, slowly turning the pages as a high-resolution camera was filming while pointed downward at the book. The takes were very long and shot in real time. Editing involved a lot of work removing background noise, adjusting framing, and synchronizing moving parts.” “Davidson College’s own Instructional Designer, Daniel Lynds, was the videographer for the project. I received a grant from the McColl Center for Art + Innovation which I used to hire Daniel. He contributed greatly to the finished product.”
Isabel: You’ve said that your bodies of work—like ‘radical tenderness’ and ‘How To’— “inform each other, sometimes directly.” What do you mean by that?
Felicia: “I began making the The How To series, which is a series of abstract, narrative collages, at the same time as I began the oil pastel Color Grids, which are documentations of observed colors. To make a Color Grid, I might be looking out the window of the printmaking studio at the McColl Center, for example, and recording the colors of the condo building opposite. I would finish by writing a caption which notes the date, weather and time of day. I wanted to keep track of the quality and color of the light. The collages, which I make from pieces of my monotype prints, are entirely from imagination and the Grids are from observation. The collage, “How to Realize Potential” uses the colors from Color Grid 4. And Color Grid 41 is made up of colors in the collage, “How to See Holland.” These pairings are on my website under “About the Work.” “I experimented with this interplay, and after some of this forced experimentation, just allowed the influence between the 2 or 4 series to happen more organically.”
Isabel: When did you start making art and what drives you to continue?
Felicia: “I was drawing before I was talking… and one of my very first pictures was of my mother crying… I started very early and clearly it was to process my emotional response to the world.” “Not making art is like not speaking my first language. It is tiring and makes me grumpy after a while. I need to speak my own language, otherwise I can’t communicate the best things I have to say. I’m also crazy about defining and solving problems, because I love learning. Making art is my most efficient way of learning, which I do through problem solving.”
Isabel: How has 2020 and quarantine affected your work? What have you been doing in quarantine/recently?
Felicia: “As far as teaching art goes, my work moved online. As an artist, I am fortunate to have three studios in which to work: my small space at home, another studio in Davidson, and the printmaking studio at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, which I manage. My access to workspaces has been limited primarily to my home studio over the past year. It is not well-suited to collage or printmaking, so I set it up as an online teaching studio. Then I gave myself a present I have wanted for many years; I hired a professional model to pose on Zoom for quick portrait paintings. I founded a group for portrait artists that meets weekly. As soon as I started the quick portraits, I noticed that my ability to mix correct colors quickly was much better since I’d done the Radical Tenderness paintings.” “I do think that part of the reason [these Zoom meetings] have been so successful is that they fulfill that need [for human connection], where as before I was making these collages and abstract work in isolation—and cherishing the isolation—now I’m cherishing community.”
Felicia van Bork is an artist best known for her paintings and collages, which focus on organic shapes and colorful compositions. She received an undergraduate degree at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 1984, and an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in 2009. Her artwork has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at venues including McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte, NC; Elizabeth Ross Gallery, Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC; Waterworks Visual Arts Center, Salisbury, NC; and Elliot University Center Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC. She has been awarded numerous honors such as Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowships, Amherst, VA; Featured Artist at the 2018 Sensoria Arts Festival, Charlotte, NC; 2017 Visiting Artist Residency at the American Academy in Rome; and residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation. She taught studio art for over twenty years, including at Davidson College. Van Bork’s paintings and collages are widely featured in the United States and Canada. Currently, van Bork is a professor of painting and drawing at Central Piedmont Community College and manages the printmaking studio at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation.
– Isabel Smith ’24