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In 2004, after more than two decades of making three-dimensional work, I returned to my roots as a painter. In June of that year, I attended the Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre, France, which provided me with the perfect opportunity to respond to my growing urge to paint again. In my tiny studio, a whitewashed cubicle that resembled a monk’s room, I felt a little like a medieval manuscript illuminator. Here I produced the first paintings I had made in years. Working in gouache and colored pencil, I was both reaching back to the paintings I made in the late 70’s and creating direct descendants of the sculpture and drawings I had done more recently. While on my residency, making the first of these images, I listened almost exclusively to archival recordings of old-time Appalachian fiddle and banjo music. The complexity, density, and intricacy of this music clearly carried over into the images. The paintings I made in France, as well as those done subsequently in my studio in Baltimore, are all miniature in scale, done on paper with gouache, colored pencil, and occasionally, water-soluble crayon. Making these paintings is an intimate and mesmerizing process, during which time my world is effectively reduced to the several square inches of paper in front of my face. It is my hope that one will have a parallel experience when contemplating these works; that they can induce in the willing viewer the trance-like state that I experience when making them. |