Easter typically brings to mind imagery of cheery eggs, fluffy bunnies, and marshmallow Peeps. But the closest thing viewers will find to springtime icons in Dark Sky at Easter, an oil painting by Lompoc local Elizabeth Monks Hack, is an eerie grouping of moonlit clouds and a darkened patch of calla lilies.
Hack described the patchwork piece, made with multiple fragments of canvas sewn together, as her jumping-off point into “a new realm of creativity.” And the painting’s gloomy title refers to one Easter Sunday in particular, she revealed via email.
“I painted it during the dark days of COVID, spring 2020,” Hack said. “I sewed large and small pieces of canvas together and waited for the ideas to materialize.”
The titular segment of the painting captures “a menacing dark sky in the east, but with a glimmer of hope in the hidden sun,” while another segment depicts a house, which Hack based on her own home, with a garden of lilies, she said.
Hack set out to illustrate themes of dusk, dawn, and the endearing cycles of both in another corner of the painting—just one of several of the artist’s works currently on display at the Cypress Gallery in Lompoc.
Piecework: An Exhibition of Patchwork Paintings debuted at the gallery at the beginning of the month and is scheduled to remain on display through Sept. 25. The solo show features a collection of Hack’s oil and mixed media pieces created over the past several years, in order to demonstrate the evolution of her art style.
“My artwork in the early years was abstract. It had references to fabric and thread, and included sewn or embroidered elements,” Hack said. “When I first began to paint ‘realistically,’ my style was loose, big, and a little rough around the edges.”
Hack’s sewn canvas pieces with abstract elements date back to the late 1980s, while her love of fabrics and sewing in general began during childhood.
“I have sewn clothing since I was a young girl and have always enjoyed the shapes and potential of flat pattern pieces,” said Hack, whose passion didn’t dwindle with adulthood. “I was a studio art major in college, but in my last year, I drifted into the costume department and designed costumes for a play.”
Soon after graduating from UC Irvine, Hack started her own successful clothing business. Although she no longer works in the fashion industry, Hack has retained her love of sewing. At the beginning of her foray into sewn canvas artworks, Hack said it felt “natural for me to see the creative potential of pieces of leftover canvas and fabric.”
Her process when it comes to patchwork art usually starts with simply shaping different pieces of canvas together, long before the local artist decides what kinds of subjects she wants to paint.
“For most of the pieces in this show, I first constructed the sewn compositions with abstract geometric shapes, and afterwards meditated on them until a representational composition revealed itself,” said Hack, who referred back to Dark Sky at Easter as an example of her process. “Once I saw the shape of my house in the composition, I saw the whole piece.”
Two of Hack’s favorite artists are abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn and iconic genre painter Johannes Vermeer, both of whom she admires for the ways in which they depict shapes and planes. Their art makes her heart “skip a beat,” Hack said, and constantly inspires her own paintings.
“An ongoing consideration for me when composing a work of art is the contrast of three-dimensional form against the flat plane,” the Lompoc local said. “When I look at my old sketchbooks, and indeed most of my paintings, flat planes and geometric shapes figure prominently.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is shaping up at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 8-15, 2022.