Statement 16.01.2025

For a while now I’ve been involved in work that directly engages the room, place, and the possibility of reverie. 

The paintings are made of multiple pieces that configure to make one large work. While related to the way traditional frescos are viewed, this work is developed without a given rectangle to measure by. It evolves from the inside out, in a relation between the body and an undefined area. 

Once the shapes are set, the painting begins. Paint is applied by: stamping, scraping, wiping, washing, cutting, dabbing, spilling, sanding, scumbling, etc. There is a relationship to the process of printmaking, and the work is intentionally made over a long period of time. The most recent work took 6 years. I want the paintings to be lived in, to be grown.

Aspects of Renaissance fresco have continued to interest me since encountering them in person as a student. How Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan locks it’s geometry to the scale of the room, including it; how Fra Angelico’s cycle at San Marco, Florence uses very little paint - and sometimes none at all - but keys the color to the building materials of the room. You can’t tell where the painting starts since you’re already kind of in it as you approach. And of course the Sistine, particularly the Last Judgement. All very different ways of experiencing an image than we do today.

The drawings are a separate activity from the painting. I stamp the shapes with different kinds of erasers cut to size. The grid is just a way to determine the scale of the piece and size of the shapes. Sometimes the grid gets completely overworked, sometimes it remains, gets rescored - the aim is to land somewhere different each time, as practice, which informs the paintings.

I began working this way in my mid 20s when I lost a large studio and had to move to a very small one. I had been working on large rectangular paintings on canvas, backed with wood: 7’ x 12’, 9’ x 11’ etc, and when I had to move I couldn’t fit them in the new space. I wanted to keep dealing with the wall, so I opened up the paintings. There were a few other currents at the same time: the fascination with Italian fresco, Mondrian’s wall pieces, Arthur Dove’s Monkey Fur - but most importantly, a need to make a human space for/with the paintings. Having grown up with increasingly dislocated images (huge on billboards, tiny in coupons, broadcast well or poorly, etc), I wanted to make space just for the paintings, that couldn’t be reproduced. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but was making first steps to root the image to place, and place to image.