Mirror (after Picasso and Renoir)
Selection from an interview by Stewart Wilson, founder of Personaland.com
I attribute my love for the Masters to the eight years I spent during high school and college at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Living almost daily during those years with the work of some of the greatest painters that ever lived certainly had a profound impact on me. It has given me a rich visual heritage. This is no doubt why my combinations are primarily intuitive, as in the case of Mirror (after Picasso and Renoir) above which combines two works of art in a fascinating way.
I often consider the foreground first leaving out the original background, and then I place other master works, objects or scenes from everyday life in the background. My graphic art, printmaking, and design studies enable me to recontextualize the borrowings using a poster-like technique. Each facet of the original is drawn to scale and subsequently painted as a flat surface. The viewer is doing the blending. In this manner, I maintain an abstract quality different from classical painting and super realism. Because I create a new reality, I believe my work is not just derivative but transformative.
There is no underlying message in the juxtaposition of images, and there is no attempt to criticize, satirize or parody the works of art that are assimilated. When combined with contemporary images, my paintings are a bit startling, but remain as homages to the great artists that inspired them.
Several years after I adopted this approach, there was a show of similar work at the Whitney entitled “Art about Art” (1978). The Pop Art movement of the 60s had demystified the famous works of art history and the artists in the show used them as elements in their paintings. Twenty years later, software techniques such as copy-paste, drag and drop, layout and photo manipulation, plus easy downloading and dissemination into various media exploded on the scene. Borrowing images and incorporating them into a new work became more widespread. The practice is officially called Appropriation Art and it is becoming a significant movement within art history.