interior with three rooms
October 5, 2011
Interior with Three Rooms, 2000, oil on canvas, 90 x 72″
I’ve received some e-mail questions about this work over the years and so thought I’d share with readers the experience of painting the piece.
In 1995 I moved from a small apartment in NYC where I lived and worked to a cavernous old house in north Jersey. I was struck by a powerful feeling of returning home, though this was like no place I had ever lived. I was taken by all the space, light coming in on four sides and character of the place. My first instinct was, ”paint something big”.
I stretched up the largest piece of canvas I could find (90 x 72 in), with no clue of what it would be and started painting. Halfway through I realized that my interest was in the magnificent light illuminating the floor, and so that became the protagonist of the work.
With four shifting light sources this had the feel of a landscape rather than an interior. It’s an amalgam really- the illumination of space over time rather than any one moment in time.
When it came time to show the piece I was floored, no pun, to find that it wouldn’t fit down the narrow staircase and into the truck. One thing to bring a roll of canvas and stretchers into a studio – quite another to move a finished painting out.
I removed the large bay window from the studio, demolished it really, slid the painting out diagonally and gently lowered it to the ground with a rope, neighbors a-watching. Al lwhile praying my landlord wouldn’t show up and see the mess I’d made.
I now work out of a different studio with a big mechanical door. But I paint smaller anyway.
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