on and under the surface

detail, work in progress, collage and decollage on found painted plywood

Surfaces with character and history have always caught my eye, from urban landscape details in New York, where I lived in the gritty ‘80s, to the 200-year-old New England home I live in now, showing its age in worn paint around door handles, marks from long ago cat scratches on the door, and gently sloping, uneven floors. Would that we all accept age so gracefully.

In the ‘90s (when, not coincidentally, I also designed sets for play productions) I made a series of miniature building facades, using wood, plaster, wax and tar as well as oils to replicate the effects of time on anonymous garages, abandoned motels, towers, and a dive bar with a diamond shaped window in a dirty red door.

my medium since 2019 is paper, often faded and torn, textured by sun and rain. As I improvise, I cover over areas, often many times. I also dig into and through past layers like an archeologist, a treasure hunter, or maybe a field medic, triaging, patching up, and sending the composition back into battle, surgery that leaves scoring and scars on the surface.

Recently I've experimented with working on surfaces that come with character of their own. Carbone di Legna (2024) is on plywood I found that had aluminum sheeting nailed over it and painted; a surface I’ve since replicated in other pieces. Right now I’m working on a large collage on some plywood that I had painted on years ago. To prepare the surface I had to sand down layers of old dried paint and tar. Now, weeks into the process, there were some areas that didn’t work. I tried my usual approach of gluing strips of other colors over them, but in the end I cut through all the accumulated layers, almost an 1/8th inch thick in places, to the bone, so to speak–revealing the painted, sanded surface of the plywood, along with remnants of paper clinging on from some of the in-between layers. Extreme decollage. I like the effect, and I like the fact that the very surface I'm working on brings something to the table.

In this age when most of our image consumption comes in pixels behind glass screens, I feel all the more confident making work that loudly declares, “this was made by human hands, in trial and error, with the stuff of everyday life.” Recycled stuff, no less. So why start from a prissy clean white piece of paper or unpainted birch plywood, with so little texture, character or history of its own?!