Paintings of Books

On any given day, if you were to visit my studio, you might find me scrutinizing some potential subject matter, or sitting at my drafting table, peering through a magnifying lamp as I work. I might be making a watercolor painting of a book. My eyes would be moving from side to side, as I painstakingly compare the painting I am working on with what I see of the subject matter. You might ask where I found this book and I would show you the stacks of other books nearby. For years, I explain, I have been accumulating books like this, as potential subject matter. I find them in used book stores, flea markets and the Little Free Library boxes in my neighborhood. The subjects range from the psychological to political or books on space and time. If you were to ask why I work this way, I would show you a book of the extraordinarily detailed watercolor paintings of bird wings and plants that Albrecht Dürer painted in the 1500s. I would tell you that I studied Dürer early in my career and found myself imagining a visit to his studio. I realized that, in order to make such precise depictions, he would have had to place the bird wing right next to his painting. Just as Dürer used watercolor with great precision to record his observations of subjects from the natural world, I use watercolor techniques to record the exact details of subjects from our cultural world. I would explain that the paintings are seldom finished but I consider them complete. I point out the framed work around the room, in which the books are displayed next to the painted copy. I would suggest that, although this is a simple juxtaposition, it can evoke a fugue of associations, in which meaning oscillates between fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary, allusion and illusion, time past and time present.