Photages

I have a large body of paintings under the heading “Photages.”  These works are done with acrylic inks and fluid acrylic paints applied directly on the surfaces of digital photos.  The first series of small (5×7” & 8×10”) paintings in this group began in early 2000 and were painted directly on the photos of my own earlier paintings.  What began as a recycling idea created enamel-like “jewels” that have both a fresh surface image and the intrigue of hidden images underneath.

The second and largest body of “Photages” are the “Library Walk, NYC” series.  Outside the New York Public Library, on 41st St. in Manhattan are a series of low-relief bronzes embedded in the sidewalk. Each bronze contains a quotation from a famous artist, writer or philosopher from ancient to modern times.  As a former New Yorker and college English major, these images had an enormous impact on me:  here was finally a way to marry my love of the painted image with the written word.

I photographed the quotations, had them printed on 16×20”  photo paper and then began a series of collages that both hide and reveal aspects of the text and bronze underneath.  Each completed painting is a new and original image that takes its direction from the words I chose to reveal and often the New York setting in which they are located.

Library Walk XX Dylan Thomas 16 x 20 – Mixed Media on Photo

The third group of Photages which grew out of the ideas in the previous ones is the Mosaic Series.  Passing my husband’s Macintosh desktop, I saw his screen saver which was the “Mosaic” program that takes all of the images in I-photo and reduces them into a series of smaller and smaller squares (hence the title Mosaic).  Intrigued, I begged my husband to photograph these images as they moved from larger to smaller squares.  These were then printed on dense photo paper and worked into a new series of paintings, some with and some without collage elements.  Many of the paintings are encased in frames that backlight, allowing the squares of photo underneath to be revealed along with the image painted on top.