paintings (for frederick hammersley)

this body of work was derived from a series of travel postcards that the painter fredrick hammersley had gathered in the early 1940’s while on military duty in europe. a few years before his death, he gave a stack of these postcards to curator rebecca mcgrew, and when she showed them to me, i was instantly smitten – not only because of my love of old printed things, but the fact that a painter whose work i loved, was attracted to these images as visuals (and potentially sources of visual information). so i asked rebecca if i could borrow the postcards, so i could spend some time with them, and i ended up making a small body of work – 20 paintings – each 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches, the same size as the postcards. you can read a longer statement from the catalog of this exhibition here.