Below the Fold

This piece features expertly rendered garments in dramatic oil portraits that I experienced in the Art Institute here in Chicago. In extracting these garments from their original context, they take on a life of their own, giving a sense of movement, of flow.
 
Four decades ago in art school, I remember the drone of the slide projector in the darkened hall of my art history classes (in which I often nodded off) as my professors explained classical works. Later in my artistic practice, I've gravitated towards modern art, but in witnessing these classical portraits recently, I was thrust into a wormhole, taking me back in time; back to art school as well as the distant past when these works were created.
 
The combination of these garments with graphic elements from art school, including dry transfer typography and a photo I made of water draining from a local pond, has compressed all of these elements into a record of my life.
 
But the interesting thing is, none of that was in my mind as I created this piece. That personal narrative worked itself out completely in my subconscious.
 
36x48x1.5" collage on stretched canvas, unframed.