The Story Behind the Bags

I started making my bags while living in Paris, after a friend of mine (Julie Bourgeois, a clothing designer) asked me to paint an image which she could sew into a sweater. I liked the outcome so much that I started learning how to sew so that I could make my own apparel and add my images. I settled on bags because their format lent itself perfectly to the size and shape of my paintings. I soon found myself cutting up old clothing and sewing bags, or just simply painting on purses and sacks I happened to find.

Most of the bags I make consist of recuperated material (my father’s old khakis, a friend’s shirt, old drapes, belts, tablecloths). Doing this makes the bags unique and also offers a challenge in terms of incorporating aspects of old objects into a new work (not to mention a pleasant departure from our continual consumption of new things). Also, for many painters, painting is a very physical and tactile act, and it is unfortunate that the outcome should be so removed (just think of the lines they put in museums to show you how far away you must stay). The bags I have made, however, are as intimate and tangible as any article of clothing (the bags I have myself have served as everything from seats when the grass is wet in the park to laundry bags). As someone who believes in suffusing life with art, I can wear my heart on my sleeve by wearing my art on my back. It is a way of bringing something you find beautiful into the banality of the everyday, a means of exposing individual taste in an increasingly homogenous world. Liberate creativity from the confines of living room walls and "art appropriate" spaces... let the world be your gallery.