It’s both disturbing and heartening to come across someone who’s independently come up with an idea that you thought was your own. There’s reassurance. You’re not crazy; it’s not just you. But there’s also disappointment. This thing that’d come into your head is not something wholly new in the world; it’s been done before.
Neil Adarwal makes paintings of shirts. They’re compelling in the way they give frumpy personality and solid form to such easily un-noticed everyday objects. There’s a magic to the drawing of folds of cloth that permeates art history, from Fra Angelico all the way through Dutch still life and Matisse, and Adarwal here masters it with a matter-of-fact flatness that retains some of the graphic power of the modern masters while injecting a playful sense of individuality and personal biography (especially with titles such as “To fieldtrips” and “If we’re meeting in the square” for the bright stiped-orange one).
About a year ago, I started a still life of a pile of shirts that were sitting on the back of my chair. The shirts sat there for about four months while I worked(drastically limitting my wardrobe). It started on one sheet of paper and grew from there. When I reached the edge of the first sheet, I just grabbed another (each sheet is about 12 by 24 inches, making the whole thing around four by eight feet). Four months later I had twelve sheets and I wasn’t quite done. One thing lead to another and I stopped, putting the thing up on my wall, without filling in all of the details, without actually finishing it.
The point is, having spent four months looking at shirts draped over things, I can tell you that I see them much the same way Adarwal does. I’ve lived in the little folds whose identity he captures with such simplicity and clarity. I’ve experienced the stretching of space into which the long cascading of sleeves pulls you, and which makes Adarwal’s chair backs, or whatever the armatures are holding up his shirts, so long and stilt-like.
Anyway, it’s a strange experience to realize that you share your eyes with someone you’ve never met and that they beat you to something you never thought you’d even get anyone else to really understand.