"You're wavered between two - between drawing and color, between the meticulous phlegm and stern resolve of the old German masters and the dazzling ardor and happy abundance of the Italians. You've tried to imitate Holbein and Titian, or Dürer and Veronese, at the same time. It was certainly a magnificent ambition, but what's happened?"

- Honore de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece

 

Over the years I have, in a sense, "collected" a group of paintings and painters. This mental collection has become a kind of inner measuring stick for me. My mental art collection directs the choices I make from a painting's start to its finish and frames my view of a painting's success or failure.

In Walter Benjamin's short essay entitled Unpacking My Library, he ruminates on his collection of books as he unpacks them. He finds himself, as he holds each book, inspired by the potential for knowledge and creativity that can be gained through each. It is not so important to Benjamin, as a collector of books, that he has read the majority of books in his library, but that he owns the books and that each represents great potential. He illustrates this idea of collecting and the potential for knowledge, by saying that when a collector "holds" the book "in his hands," he "seems to be seeing through" the book and into its "distant past as though inspired". In a similar way, I, too, have a collection of artists that I frequently "unpack" and consider and become inspired by; among them: Caravaggio, Lasker, Marden, Matisse, Nozkowski, Stephan and Vermeer. Like Benjamin it is not so important that I fully understand the work of each artist but that I live with each in the same intimate way a collector lives with any collection--holding each artist's images and ideas up for study, reflection and for inspiration.

When I step into the studio each day, I draw upon the artists I'm currently studying and those already forming my "mental art collection." Because I am always learning, during the painting process my artistic references are in flux and can change. While I am painting I may consider the relationship that one artist has to another or how I like one aspect of a painting from each of these artists. I also think about how these artists have interacted with the heritage of which they have now become a part. For example, I have considered how the hand of Christ in Caravaggio's painting "The Calling of St. Matthew" is similar to the hand of Adam painted by Michelangelo in "The Creation of Adam" portion of the Sistine Ceiling. I consider issues like these as I paint and try to weave them in as imagery or as referential aspects of my paintings.