Description
Last spring I painted a piece I called “Blossoms Squared” where I superimposed a grid over a reference photo and painted it one square at a time. This triggered a stream of ideas. I thought about simply rotating the grid so they were on the diagonal, but also thought about other “screens” through which to create an image and started seeing them everywhere: a brick wall, detailed scrolled ironwork… But then, I thought about maps. I love maps! One that I know well and is very close to my heart is the street map of Paris. Thus emerged the seed for this painting. These flowers were in a florist’s sidewalk display on rue Monge in the 5th in Paris – not far from where my apartment was when I lived there for a half a year. Setting it up, though was a challenge and took my technical skills to pull off. If I simply enlarged a street map of Paris, the width of the streets would be so large that they’d obscure too much of the flowers. Using my projector and Photoshop, I was able to create a reasonable “screen” out of the map. In order to have a reasonable level of detail to cope with, I ended up being able to use only the very center of Paris (not even the Eiffel Tower made it in) to superimpose over the image of the flowers. “Blossoms Squared” is quite two dimensional, so the fact that there ended up being quite a bit of depth in this painting completely surprised me. It is an entirely different way to think and paint. I had to find the image within each of the shapes on the map. It was interesting to watch myself switching back and forth between concentrating on the image of the flowers and noticing where I was in the city and either remembering when I’ve been in that spot or wondering what is there on that stretch of street – apartments, restaurants, bookstores? Even without the street names, I still recognize a remarkable number of streets and bridges. I wonder if I’d painted this image as I normally do, from a contour drawing, if it would be as interesting. I’m so grateful for the creative spark to explore ideas like this. Now which map/image combo is next? I tossed around myself and talked about possible names several times with others. More involved names seemed forced, so I decided to keep its name super simple. This is Paris.
May – June 2013
