Requiem

Oops-I had a solo exhibition of my imaginary landscape series and never made a blog post about it. Well, you can see the paintings in the Recent Work portfolio section of this site! 

I’ve begun a new series of paintings I’m calling Requiem, based on photographs of deceased people that have had an impact on my life. I really liked the broken, distressed slabs of clay that I used in the Imaginary Landscape series, and leaned into that when making slabs for this new project. I have found deciding on what photo references to use to be  way more difficult than I could have imagined, not to mention deciding who to paint. 

For the first in the series I decided to paint my mother, who died when I was 17 and she was 51. As you can imagine, I have countless photographs I could have worked from, but for some reason I chose literally the very first photo that was ever taken of her, in May of 1927. The photo is of course black and white, and it’s blown out and blurry, but there is something so evocative about the photo I followed my instinct and used it. Here is a work-in-progress shot, sorry it’s on the weird old green cutting mat that’s on my desk. I like the Zoomed in view because you can see how the cracks/texture in the clay work with the painting and there is less of the distracting green mat visible. Of course once it’s finished, I’ll do a better photo of the entire painting.