Rooftops

Do you ever venture into a Starbucks, glance up over your Venti Caramel Half-Caf Soy Latte, and wonder, does someone get paid to decorate this place with tacky illustrations of Europe?
Last fall, with my “Rooftops” series, I became one of these decorators. (And no, we do not get paid.)

But let’s start at the beginning.

Compared to my familiar aesthetic and conceptual experiences with urban and suburban settings, the town of Aix en Provence seemed a mere continuation of the color-rich earth upon which it was built. Its natural growth and adaptations were more of a priority than the sterility and perfection which, in my experience, are so often the goal.
This change in atmosphere, brought about by a three-week landscape painting course, called for a similar permutation in my artwork. I began to make work about process, about medium, about immediacy and boldness, about delving into the freshness of experiencing a specific atmosphere for the first time. My familiar homogenized media no longer felt appropriate. It was time to break from my comfort zone. I introduced natural pigments (marginally refined dirt) and allowed my brush to accumulate paint organically, until it could have been excavated, each emerging layer revealing a painting or a day, a thought or a journey.
The palettes of my France paintings began to become just as valuable to me as the paintings themselves, both formally and conceptually. The palette is a record of the experience of painting, of each neuron fired, each trial and error and decision that led to the glimpse of a scene beside it.
I'm still sifting through all of my thoughts from this intense and alien three-week excursion, and I still don't feel like those paintings are quite resolved. But that body of work had an ironic finality when it was hanged in a symbol of my immediate suburban existence (which, as much as I hate to admit it, had played just as important a role in the work as anything else): a Starbucks.
The first phase of those paintings changed me - reacting to my new visual and visceral stimuli, enunciating the differences between my familiar surroundings and my current ones, mentally and with my brush. The process was fast and unhesitant and exhilarating. The second phase was less conscious and more resisted, but no less satisfying or significant: I needed to reconcile my two experiences, to allow the new conceptual, emotional and visual information to ingratiate itself with the rest of my experiences and exposures, one more cloud in my coffee. The self I see in those paintings and the self I see in the Starbucks wall I so often glanced at with disdain needed to mingle and learn to coexist.
“Rooftops” is about process, most literally the process of painting. But it has come to represent all of the other processes that “Rooftops” went through at my hand and that I went through at the hand of “Rooftops.”