Why these paintings, in particular? Two years ago I embarked on my Myriorama project. The end was 451 paintings, abstract, 12 x 12, exhibited at Veronique Wantz, affixed to the walls (every available inch!) with velcro, so that visitors could change placing, and orientation. Fun! Deprivilege the object, permit “ordinary” people the chance to rearrange the walls, as we rearrange our lives. Some did. The show is still up, and daily … it gets moved around.
As for what is a Myriorama:
…the myriorama—whose name was derived from the Greek words myrias, meaning “multitude,” and orama, meaning “scene” or “view.” A myriorama comprised a set of illustrated cards, each representing a slice of a landscape. No matter what order you placed them in, the cards created a cohesive scene.
That from the Huntington Museum. I played with one as a child.
As for my process and progress:
It was just one thing after another, and sometimes my blood was hot with possibilities – theme and variation and whatever I came to notice. Assaulting the surface with feather, bones, newsprint, maps, palette plastic, transgressing the picture plane: new materials, new tools (becoming intimate with a box cutter), new techniques for me. Or sometimes if it pleased me and I thought up some confluence with what panels came before, harking back to line, luminance, chrominance, massing and armature: the well-trodden vocabulary of the abstract academy. My mind was a magpie. A power I don’t easily recognize stirred it, made up in equal parts elation, hilarity, and fatigue.
When I thought, I thought about how the eye should dance around over this surface or that, rotating the panel until I could confuse left and right, top and bottom, as an abstraction properly should be: lawless even in the face of gravity. I was fast on a stair that led up to elsewhere. Sometimes I was painting the Sistine Chapel with hands full of Crayola chalk. Etchings of octopi, birds, and bees were scissored from some inoffensive piece of paper and glued in place – they could buzz in my mind’s ear as long as they sat before me on my easel.
As for 451:
From Ray Bradbury’s Farhenheit 451 . More books, not fewer! I’m all for free thought, freer reading.
