"Paesaggi Storici" (Storied Landscapes)

For the mixed media paper works in the “Storied Landscapes” (Paesaggi Storici) series, I began with collaged color photographs from a Times Life book on the Badlands. I then interwove onto these images a series of transparent and colored layers disarticulating the weathered landscape into a more personal skein. For this series, I employed a group of drafting techniques that I normally do not use such as oil pastels, colored pencils and spray washes. Each of these sets of superimposed images and marks references both specific personal thoughts regarding erosion as well as art from the Modernist period in northern France, Belgium and Holland. The specific personal reflections were culled from studies of Existentialism and its calculus of mortality. These homages to painters were directed to the lesser-known “awkward” abstractionists from that period, including those written about by Samuel Beckett.

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