views

views are a series of 14 paintings based on several views of a 12th century cathedral in Siena famous for it’s Gothic, octagonal black and white pulpit designed by Nicola Pisano.

while working with the walter benjamin archives, i spent some time with the few postcards that remained in his archives, as most of the collection was lost. the single view of the siena cathedral in the archives, was the first image of that space that i’d ever seen, and the black and white marble reminded me a lot of the work of anne truitt. i spent some time on ebay trying to get an exact copy of benjamin’s postcard – same publisher, same time – but i was unable to find an exact match. at the same time, i started buying views of the interior of the cathedral published around the same time of the card in the collection, and ended up with 14 different views.

an important aspect of my practice involves contradiction – and breaking rules such as “i never make paintings from photographs”. in this case, i was interested in the idea of stripe paintings, sort of thinking about gene davis but more so how the lines in the photographic image might feel as hand painted forms. obviously there was a huge distinction between solid slabs of marble and slightly awkward lines of oil paint.

i spent much of my early career making paintings this scale (humble), and felt it would be interesting to build a body of small paintings, while at the same time working on the two largest paintings i’ve ever made. it’s always been important to move back and forth between scale, to disrupt any sense of being in a “groove”.

the other important thing about these small paintings is that they did not follow a score, and in fact, were simply made in relation to the postcard images and working intuitively. again, important in relation to the process of the larger paintings which did follow scores.