"Venetian Dream" the title of my upcoming exhibition at Brian Gross Fine Art, refers to a dream that I had on my first night in Venice in the spring of 2009.
In the dream a picture appeared of how to begin a drawing. The rule was so simple yet compelling. A spiral like structure was built with a series of dashes beginning with one dash, then at a right angle 2 dashes, another right angle three dashes and so on.
The next morning I began the first of several 7"x5" pencil drawings exactly as I had dreamt it. Intuitively I understood that being in Venice, a place so wondrously and luminously expansive, was what led to the dream. The very unfurling suggested in the rule was a metaphor for a soaring of my artistic vision.
I returned to the studio after my Venetian vacation and began making larger works on paper and small paintings on linen. I found that the rhythm and harmonies that occurred were less predictable, and that I was able to push the boundaries of what I thought was a balanced composition.
My work has always been about building, allowing each rule to suggest the next rule with a sort of non-thinking, like a spider making a web, or a bird making a nest, realizing that I know nothing.
6 comments:
I know what you mean by allowing each rule to suggest the next rule when I have patience to do detail drawings. sometimes when I do an inverse of a flower and magnify it, there a lot of rectangular pixels that, when filled with color, lead me down an unsuspected path; e.g., if I am filling in pixels in a straight line, a pixel to the right or left will get filled in also, giving me another design element to deal with.
I am thoroughly enjoying getting to know more about your atrwork. Not an artist myself I admire and appreciate the skill, time and labor, inspiration and meaning artists put into their work.
The "Venetian Dream" series is truly remarkable! Your description about the work and then seeing it in sequence (?) really tells the story of how it evolved.
Another reason I am posting in this blog is to let you know that I have been admiring an early work of yours, in my home, for the past twenty-some years.
(cont.) The work is from 1986, painting on linen.
Thank you Robin for your nice comment.Are you based in the Washington DC area? I can not imagine wha the painting on linen might be. Do you have a photo of it?
Hi Andrea, The painting is titled "Blue Lake". I will get my son to take a photo of it with his iphone and we can send it to you if you like. You can contact me through my gmail account and let me know where to send it.
Thanks for your reply! Robin--robin.gina@gmail.com.
I live in the Washington, DC area.
Robin
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