This work arose from the desire to place my work in the context of artists whose work I admire.  My first three years as a painter were spent obsessing over Giorgio Morandi and Janet Fish, and I produced a slew of small still lifes exploring shape relations and extreme detail.  Although I became more confident in my technical ability, my portfolio of “pantry-items on the kitchen table” existed in a vacuum, ignoring what I felt was a parentage of earlier artists.  I wanted to create paintings in which the existence of Morandi or Fish was an essential prerequisite for my own work.  I thus turned to painting as a reproductive act: copying the work of another artist and altering it piecemeal until something wholly new arose.

I accomplish my reproductions by copying a work as it appears on my laptop screen such that the reflections on the glass screen become superimposed atop the copied work.  This conceit was inspired by Brunelleschi’s “S. Giovanni and the Piazza del Duomo,” the first of his perspective demonstration pieces.  At the places on the picture where the walls of the Piazza vanish into air, Brunelleschi laid down burnished silver such that the sky, moving clouds and all, would be reflected onto the picture plane.  As Brunelleschi’s reflections bridge the gap between reality and the painted world, the reflections in my painting process create a link between the original work and my own