This work is made of images of self-portraits produced by the masters of painting. Within this piece are slices of pictures by Dürer, Velàsquez, Rembrandt (the premier self-portraitist), Van Gogh (with and without ear), and Picasso (look for his Blue Period self-portrait in the shirt.) This self-portrait is a sort of tribute to what I've learned from these artists, and also a kind of metaphor for the admiration and irritation I feel about their collective ability to have completely mapped and delimited the field of painting before the day I was born.
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It appears to me as if the painting medium was a sort of new country to these old masters, with mountains and valleys and rivers and deserts to explore, but the country isn’t new anymore, it’s been settled and tamed. And as much as I sense that the country of painting is my natural home, and the wellspring of my ideas, I’d much rather inhabit a new little island, a new medium that I created - woven color plates. This medium is brand new, new like those islands that volcanos bring forth out of the South Pacific.
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My medium island isn’t large, it’s got many limitations, for example I can make my works only so big, because they take so long to make. And for raw material my work depends on a supply of books filled with color plates, which reminds me of the way people living on an island depend on supplies from the mainland. And though I planted the proverbial flag upon this island, I’ve seen similar techniques elsewhere, so I don’t doubt that someday more artists will weave color plates together, and I’ll have to share this island with them. |
