RELICS & MEMORIES
30 X 40
TESSERAE
$2600

For this piece I chopped three older canvases of mine into small squares … like tessera to create an entirely new image laid over an older painting that was in turn due to be destroyed.

Each tessera being the relic of an older painting is now too small to hold any importance other than how it can be used in the construction of the new image. Sometimes its value might be color, sometimes line, and sometimes texture. And, just like a memory can reveal a new significance each time we examine it, so too do these little bits of old paintings take on new meaning in this new context. Their power lies in being able to adapt and become part of the greater whole.

I enjoy thinking about the new image … it is itself only a memory and made up of bites of memory. Perhaps it is an imagined image of Rye, that fabulous English Cinque Port Town. Or maybe it is some lovely stone Tuscan Hill Town from my memories of Italy, or one of the old Roman towns in the south of France. But, like all memories, it is now composed of immutable pieces of other memories mixed together to create a new reality.

The process of using these little bits and pieces is akin to being visited by those random fleeting glimpses of events long gone, triggered by new events that bring back a sense of another place or time.