more Deafman's Villa

studio & bedroom of the Deafman's Villa (the Quinta del Sordo of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes)

New Work in Progress: Deafman's Villa (the Quinta del Sordo of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes)

I was in Madrid for a large block of time in late 2006 and spent a lot of time dwelling on the notion of old black Spain; that particularly fleeting quality of the Iberian Peninsula sometimes expressed in duende, in the still perceptible backwater of Spanish life held over from the destruction of the Inquisition, and countless fascist regimes, on the country's intellectual life, and the dark, paper manifestations of Goya. After returning from Spain I read Robert Hughes biography on Francisco, and learned, much to my surprise that the late "black paintings" which hang in the Prado, were originally painted directly on the walls of Goya's house (the Quinta de Sordo), and transferred to canvas years after his death.

Goya was an artist without rivals... without peers or contemporaries, without competition in his homeland of Spain. He found artistic brotherhood in the emergent printmaking techniques coming out of England, France, and Italy. He may even have crossed paths with Piranesi in Rome.

Being both a painter for the Spanish court and an social critic through his prints and paintings; Goya was one of the first artists to emancipate himself from the bonds of commissioned work, and in so doing, may have found an alternative form of artistic companionship.

The Deafman's Villa, is a fictional re-imagining of the domestic world in which the "black paintings" came into being, and the situational nature of the old black Spain to which Goya belonged.

(these are the first drawings of a large series to come)

New Work: The Vanity and Entombment of Marie Antoinette

What are the consequences of a non-consensual life... arranged marriage, the solipsistic mores of the French court, the impossible and contradictory expectations put upon a teenager when asked to be both royal and decadent, modest and provincial, despite a form of cloistered life; to live irreconcilably between national and familial identities... to suffer revolutions eventually made moot.

New Work: Crystal Confessional

I was in Florence in 1996 for its first fashion biennial. At the Academia, a collection of Valentino's signature red dresses lined the hall up to the David, and in the Medici Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Gianfranco Ferre had hung a series of diaphanous, fluorescent-vermilion crinolines within the dome. As with so many other like-minded experiences that I had while living in Italy... the Italians allowed me to inherit the precedent and permission to corroborate with the past. That same year I had gone to see Leon Baptista Alberti's church of San Andrea in Mantua. Having arrived just after a morning service, the air was thick with the fog of frankincense... a religious weather which somehow triggered a literary scene in my mind: the air of a New York high society party, the entertaining of oil barons and newspaper tycoons, heavy with the smoke and perfume of Cuban cigars suddenly cut by the blazing facets of a cocktail ring or the wheel cut channels of a Waterford highball...

this channeled apparition, coupled with my interests in how the invention of glass changed architecture forever, and that confessions were once done in plein-air was the initial structure for this work.

New Work: Porcelain Cabin

In the mid 20c. the Swiss architect Le Corbusier built a modest cabin retreat for himself on the French Riviera in Roquebrune. He built it shoulder to shoulder with a cafe and would take his meals by entering into its dining room through a "ship's door." It was an intentionally incomplete project, and one fraught with the contradiction of a life both searching for self-sufficiency, emancipation, natural dependence, and a way of living that was not explicitly Western. The porcelain cabin exists in the tradition of American projects like Thoreau's Walden and Le Corbusier's primitive hut ... it is not only a search for a first architecture, but the possibility of also being a last architecture... a project which questions the durational expectations of dwelling.

It is not incidental that Le Corbusier mysteriously drown in 1965 while swimming in the warm Mediterranean waters just off the rocks from his Petit Cabanon.

recent drawing from a series of "confessionals" situated in composite Italian churches... this one in particular drew on my study of soundholes in period instruments and renaissance paving patterns.