Tamar Cohen‘s relationship with dots has her circling the globe in search of inspiration. She is a polka dot lady through and through, although Yayoi Kusama is the Dot Queen. But who’s going to quibble over who is more doting on dots? Not I! Cohen, a Brooklyn-based artist, has just launched a new website highlighting her love for dots. Below, we discuss what makes a circle so appealing and her loyalty to the dot world.
Why are you such a dot fanatic?
Not a clue, just lucky I guess. Dots are joyous, who wouldn’t want to hang out everyday with dots?
You essentially stopped doing graphic design in favor of your art, am I right?
Correct.
How long have you been a dot-person?
Dots have been my signature motif since college when vintage polka dot dresses filled my closet. It was never my intention to focus on only using dots in my art, but I keep finding new ways to stay engaged. They are extremely versatile: groups of dots, grids of dots, negative dots, blurry dots, or dissected dots. For me, dots are a vehicle to explore my visual narrative rather than an endpoint.
Can you explain your process?
They are silkscreen collages. Everything I do is one of a kind. I think of myself as an artist who combines collage and printmaking. When I begin a piece, I pick a theme: comics, old books, or maps, then I edit. Editing is time consuming but it’s fun, I get to go through my many paper collections which are an essential component in my work. The next step would be to go to the SVA Printshop and print. Discovering my love of silkscreen changed my life in so many ways. I realized I had really missed using my hands after so many years of sitting in front of a screen. I love that it has allowed me to marry my love of ephemera with paint, color, and form— and it brought me back to polka dots.
Once I have my piles of silkscreened pages, the work begins. When work is fast and easy to produce, I don’t feel the same sense of accomplishment, so I often begin with complex and chaotic compositions. My goal is to make order out of the chaos. I work with multiple layers of information: the existing printed ephemera and the printed dots which come in many sizes, negative and positive. I decide then what kind of composition I want to create and loosely tape everything together. I have many series that I alternate working on. Last winter I worked on my strip collages that I weave together. Those are slightly less time-consuming than the large collages, which take 25–30 hours to glue. It’s exhausting, if I had a superpower, it would be flawless speed gluing.
Do you believe, as I do, that there is a kind of dot pandemic of late?
I would not say they are more dotular these days, they are always timeless.
What is next for you?
A trip to Tokyo and then back to work!
