I start with ripping apart issues of Architectural Digest and create dozens of collages very quickly that I make to capture a certain mood. From these compositions, I select the few that I’ll develop into paintings. These are the paintings that make up “Memory of Place”.
My emotional connection to an event or place is tied to the space where it happened. A room’s ceiling as the witness to some personal tragedy will always be the sky for me on that day.
The sad hump of an old overstuffed chair is the mountain’s edge sat in the background of a room I longed to escape. A rusty gate’s feel on my hand letting me know I’ve come home.
Whether it’s space outside myself or within, its largeness is not the bounty of the horizon but the vastness of experience. The texture of one tree’s bark is an immense language of hills, valleys, age and scars born from earth that fed it.
Buildings that surround, house, inspire awe in us, creating the illusion of permanence and security from the chaos of the natural world. The doors that face the outside world and stop us from walking into a home. The walls that tell us where we belong and where we forbidden to go.
This jumble of detail and impressions from every stair climbed, a bridge crossed, skyscraper’s shadow that darkened my path, a window that framed my reference of a sky, create the inner landscape that is my collection of experience.
Sam Silva says
I like these and like as well the method described in the introduction