Double Exposure

   
In exploring the main hall of NYC’s Metropolitan Museum I try many photo experiments. The hall is a rich reference to antique Greco-Roman architecture and, it hold the ghosts of  art history. I tried double exposing photos  to conjure an atmosphere of  panhistoric inhabitation. I then took ideas from some of those photos( see photo) and used them as a platform for my painting’s theme, the past inhabits the present.  Compare one of my photos with the painting. You can see where I departed from the photo’s information by inventing casts of new characters, increasing value contrasts, adding space and, where I culled figures and shapes from the photo.  The photograph becomes material to react to, not to imitate. As I looked into the wet paint I discovered new figures  and architectural spaces behind the photo’s spaces. As the great jazz horn player Clark Terry once said of improvisation, ” I play the standard tune until I am bored enough  that I must do something to it.”  Improvisation and invention are  reactions.