James Welling is associated with the artists of the Pictures Generation (a group that also includes Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, among others), who have investigated photography as a field with a specific history that is simultaneously the broad basis for all visual representation in our time. In 1981 Welling began photographing drapery in connection with his early experiments with photographic abstraction, and he has often returned to this subject throughout his career. Green Drapes evokes the curtain's many historical uses in theater, painting, and studio portraiture, while also emphasizing its sensuous physicality and near flatness.
