| WorkStatement About My Work Statement About My Work
In 1960 I was painting calligraphic images of cursive script. The "writing" was not readable. My paintings were abstract images of "paragraphs." In time, I began adding images of well-known paintings. These images were generic still lifes and landscapes and figure paintings. It was my intention that the image would be immediately recognized as a painting, so I chose familiar paintings for quotation: Millet's The Man with a Hoe, English and Dutch portraits, Chardin still lifes, Constable landscapes. My painting created an image of an illustration with a paragraph of associated text: "Composition with Illustration."
By the mid-Sixties the calligraphic paragraphs disappeared from my work and I was making paintings of paintings, paintings that had paintings as their subject. I sometimes repeated the same image on one canvas, sometimes juxtaposed two or more different "quoted" images. I placed the quoted image of a painting on a one-color ground, which provided a self-defining border for the composition.
During the Seventies I began emulating the style and technique of the quoted masters in my paintings of famous paintings. Vermeer's painting statement was so clear that I saw I could combine two or more Vermeers into new compositions. My series of Vermeer paintings was the subject of an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1974, and the following year at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York.
By the end of the Seventies many artists were working with what came to be called "appropriation art," so much so that in 1978 the Whitney Museum in New York organized an exhibition on the theme Art About Art which included some paintings from my Vermeer series. Among the artists participating in that exhibition were Dotty Attie, John Clem Clarke, Josef Levi, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Rivers.
One day in 1984 I was looking at the Vermeers in the National Gallery in Washington. A wall label attributed one of the paintings to the School of Vermeer. Thinking about the question of attribution of paintings, I asked myself what the school of Vermeer would look like. I painted a schoolroom with blackboard and wooden desks, an image right out of my childhood. It was an image that I had been working with at the time in a number of "schoolroom" paintings. But in the School of Vermeer, emulating Vermeer's technique, I placed in the schoolroom figures from various Vermeer paintings, such as Woman with her Maidservant Writing a Letter, Woman Pouring Milk, and Woman Weighing Gold. The School of Vermeer turned out to be the first of more than forty "School of..." paintings -- from The Ashcan School and The Barbizon School to The School of Velazquez. These paintings are the subject of a book Art School by George Deem published by Thames & Hudson in 1993 in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the paintings organized by the Evansville, Indiana, Museum of Arts and Science.
Statement written 1993 |