DISCOVERING Connections

ERIC WERT'S NEWEST STILL LIFES LINK FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND ELEMENTS IN COHESIVE COMPOSITIONS.

- JOHN O'HERN

An Eric Wert’s early paintings the backgrounds were often textiles he found in a fabric store. The patterns and colors would complement his still lifes. Then he met Marci Rae McDade, who has an MFA in fiber and material studies, became editor of Fiberarts magazine, and then editor of the Surface Design Association Journal. She is now his wife.

“Marci’s a great influence,” Wert admits. “When you go to a museum, you focus on what appeals to you. For me that’s Dutch paintings. She dragged me to see textiles, and I gained a new appreciation of them. There are many parallels. The optical mixing of colors was developed by the Flemish masters as they wove together threads of different colors.

“Today the textile collections of museums are online with high-resolution images so I have access to the greatest textiles in the world,” he continues. “I browse and then download images. When I’m working on a painting I leave the background kind of simple and wait for a connection to merge— theme, color, composition. The background is an equal partner in my paintings. It’s just as interesting and worthy of inspection as anything in the foreground.”

I mention to him the leaves in Cherries, especially the lone yellowed leaf, seem to pick up the weave of the fabric behind them. He responds, “That’s one of the things I like—discovering connections. It would be easy to set everything up and work from a photograph. I could make all the decisions in the set-up. As I work over months, discoveries start to emerge. It’s intuitive. It’s the magic of painting. The basic data is there in a high-resolution photograph. The challenge is to leave space in the painting for connections to emerge.”