One can almost picture Jill Maytorena in her studio surrounded by heaps of vibrant textiles, colorful printed paper, ribbons, embroidery—and, of course, her pastels. Together, they will coalesce into elaborately patterned portraits, in which there is no firm delineation between the figure and the tapestry she is immersed in.
“It starts with an intuitive grabbing of [pieces of fabric]—based on design principles—and being excited about how I’m going to reconcile this disorder or chaos,” says Maytorena.
Persimmon, pastel and mixed media, 48 x 26"
For her piece Persimmon, she focused on the patterns and the way the materials related to one another rather than what the figure would be. “I intentionally chose pieces that, in my mind, did not go together,” she says. “It’s nonsensical in a sense, but I also trust my intuitive process to make connections between things that don’t connect.”
She began to see color unifying the strips of material and the elements adhered to the fabric—old embroidery with beads in the flowers; the graphic design and reds and golds in a Japanese obi. After affixing them to the canvas, Maytorena uses a gel medium to add tooth to catch the pastels she lays over top, using different methods depending on the texture of the area she’s working on.
Ivy & Neet, pastel and mixed media, 36 x 24"
“It is a very clear place of problem solving and magic,” she says. “It’s like a conversation and I have to make sure I am listening as well as putting my own marks or voice into it. I have to really look at what’s happening and pay attention to where the pastel is doing something strange and, instead of thinking it’s not working, respond to that and really challenge myself to believe there isn’t an accident or problem in this image that I can’t unify. That is incredibly exciting to me.”
When she first used appliqué in her work, she thought someone was going to pull her over and give her a ticket. “It felt very daring to incorporate an element that could be seen as kitsch and approach it in a different way. I was hesitant and then embraced what has been making sense to me—the idea of a multilayered image, creating a tapestry myself out of the elements I have chosen.
Flora Zephyry, pastel and mixed media, 22 x 60"
“Looking at my own internal self, I am a collage,” she continues. “There’s not just one element of me and I like the idea of mixing things together. Now I’m especially drawn to patterns that are incongruent. To take those things, just like in my inner self, aspects that contradict or clash, and taking chaos into a level of coherence.”
There are deeper layers to Maytorena’s work than even those that meet the eye. She has been powerfully influenced by the pattern and decoration movement of the 1970s and 80s, and has always been interested in how arts and crafts, often thought of as women’s work, haven’t historically been thought of as fine art.
In earlier portraiture, she used vintage sewing patterns as the background, exploring issues around size and the female figure. Her current style emerged from there.
Black Dress in Red, pastel and mixed media, 24 x 36"
Maytorena refers to a poem in which Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska writes, “I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.” Maytorena explains, “They may move in the sky but stars are fixed points. But flies are movement, chaos, the patterns they create when they’re flying around are unexpected and would never be the same. That’s how I want to approach each piece—that I can intuitively pick anything and work from that place of possibility.”
Maytorena will be showing her work at the Festival of Arts Fine Art Show in Laguna Beach, California, from July 3 through August 8. —
Powered by Froala Editor
