Scenes
Consider the idea of a painting of a place. It is not of a specific place or any one particular painting. It is a meta-text of place painting encompassing the ruins of the Modern and the Postmodern, has long since swallowed whole cinema’s mise-en-scéne, bathed itself in Los Angeles sunshine. Now please consider: a painting of that idea. Paintings of the idea of paintings of places. That is what these paintings are — site constructions in a vast imaginary somewhere, bounded by my limited frame of reference. As layers of paint they sit thinly on their surfaces. They hide no secrets of the story of their making. They are often more diagramatic than picturesque, and self-consciously the behind-the-scenes featurette rather than the actual film. Each is an attempt to reconstitute this expansive idea of place painting in tiny fragments, by design destined to fail. But perhaps they succeed, at least, at being paintings of places.