aegean space is now complete. it now has that balance i seek between complexity and simplicity. it's always that first glance that tells the story, and often i have to wait till the following morning to know if it's there or not. notice, by the way, that the image has been flipped 180 degrees from yesterday's state.
on the right, the 1st stage of a smaller collage on paper i started yesterday, with a riff on the calligraphy of 11th c. chinese master huang tingjian. i've decided to keep it as is, in order to put together a little presentation on how this current series of collages on paper evolve. many of them start out this way, with traces of the original calligraphy-play still visible in the final version.
divorced from their original meaning as words and concepts, the painterly play of marks maintains it's power as timeless a set of meaningful signs.
on the 2nd row is a new piece i just completed this afternoon, titled brooklyn. brooklyn, which can be found on the map in the upper right quadrant, is my birth place & thus holds special meaning for me. following the trend of more recent smaller collages, the expansiveness of the space is a by product of the larger scale collages i've been doing on canvas. the blue on the bottom of the collage is from a map of andros, the cycladic island where we spent all our summers during my 15 years in greece. in aegean space, there is a portion of a map of andros in the upper central quadrant.
so both brooklyn and aegean space are more biographical than the others, and tell a piece of the story you will find on my "chatty bio" page.
