ten paintings

in 2000, i completed a series of ten paintings, each inspired by the title of a sculpture from a 1959 MOMA sculpture catalog with no images. i interested in using the title of a work i’d never seen (as well as being in a different medium) as a starting point, allowing the words to suggest connective tissue, various inspirations and a series of relative collisions of subjects and source materials. throughout the process of building each painting, i wanted to maintain some relationship to the phrase in every step that i took during the making.

for example: the painting “sleepwalker” included a form derived from a snapshot of a log cabin, but the image orientated on it’s side so that it looked as if the building was sleeping (sleep)… the letters in the same painting were taken from important locations on a map for a walk (walker), and looser inspirations were gathered from one of my favorite books, the sleepwalkers by hermann broch. as you can see, the associations in relation to the title phrase can be both literal and obtuse; but the hope was that everything would be connected, even if the strands were fragmented, idiosyncratic or very thin. i was also interested in seeing how unrelated things could exist together in the works, in the hope that they might inspire or direct not only visual movement and but conceptual breadth, but to create a visual work that could offer a multitude of experiences and, more importantly, interpretations.

these were to be the last group of paintings i made where letters were the most significant visual presence in the work. they were shown at the jenn joy gallery in san francisco, in a solo exhibition in 2001