Drapery Paintings

Long considered the providence of women, drapery is a universal indicator of culture, identity and status. Drapery has provided me for several decades with a vehicle for personal emotional expression: as a channel for conversations with artists of the past, to celebrate the unbounded joie de vie of grandchildren, and as a lamentation over political corruption, our climate crisis and deep personal loss.

MORE ABoUT HOLLY DOWNING’S DRAPERY PAINTINGS

I used to sew a lot.  I like fabric. I find beauty in the folds, and in the shadows between the folds.  When I was in college at UC Santa Cruz and was asked in a drawing class, to render some fabric in a still life, I couldn’t begin to understand how to do that - how to create 3 dimensional realism on a flat piece of paper.  I marveled at the beautiful rendering of folds by another student, but that challenge haunted me over the years, until I was teaching students in the UK, and gave them that same challenge. and decided it was high time to tackle the challenge myself.  So for the next decade I devoted myself to mastering the rendering of drapery - in pencil, ink and charcoal, in oil paintings, and in mezzotint engravings, exploring how light and shadow and repositioning the same fabric gave it different personalities.  I became a bit obsessed!  

I realized that the drapery was a portal for me.  It could be an opening through which to explore my different feelings and reactions to the world.  In the beginning, I studied the great Renaissance paintings and drapery studies of the  Masters (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Zurburan), and I began to have personal conversations with them.  I could see how the artists often imbued the drapery with the emotional content of the whole painting - with brooding, or agitation, sexual seduction or quiet meditation.  The emotional expression of the painting didn’t seem to even require that people be in the painting, so I left the people out!   

Over time, I expanded my drapery paintings to focus on my own emotional states - lamentation over political behavior in the world, a spiritual farewell when my mother died, or intense grief over the sudden loss of my brother; exuberance and delight with my young grandchildren and dismay over environment degradation and climate change, as well as anger over the unlawful, derogatory behavior of a recent president.

And over time I began to explore other cultures, when traveling, through their drapery or textiles.