Jayson Musson Makes Paintings Out Of Cut Up Jumpers

moray mair | Art and design | July 19, 2012

Jayson Musson has created ‘Halycon Days’ a series of paintings made from cut-up sweaters that have been stretched and sewn together. I like them but would be more interested in feeling the textural quality of the paintings. Would they be warm? Comforting?

Here’s what the artist said about his inspiration for the work

One spring night in 2011, while combing the internet, I came across an image of a hooded sweater made by Coogi, an Australian clothing company. Coogi brand sweaters are commonly known for their vibrant textured knits and most commonly conjure a generational association with Bill Cosby as Clifford Huxtable on The Cosby Show, or the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. of Bed-Stuy, NY. As someone raised on rap music and its signifiers.

The thing I found most alluring about Coogi sweaters was how painterly they were. They seemingly lingered on the borders of gestural abstraction. I made the joke, “That Coogi looks like a Pollock”. Over the course of the following weeks, I began collecting images of the sweaters, studying their composition. They seemed to defy the traditional logic of the textile, opting instead to appear spontaneous and created by hand rather than machine-made. Each sweater, though a manufactured object seemed to seek its own authenticity. Even the old Coogi slogan “Wearable Art” seemed to confirm the desire for each sweater to be considered an objet unique, a specialized commodity.

Via Junk Culture