Alice /Lear

( 1990 – 1996 )

My approach to art making catalyzed in 1986, when I found a book of Braille paper on the streets of New York.  Braille’s tactile typographies suggested a way to inscribe content within minimalism’s formal geometries. Paintings based on Shakespeare’s play King Lear, like Book of Days and Kingdom, incorporate Braille pages as both the geometric structure and the literal body of each painting, with each painting’s palette inspired by the events transpiring in the text.  This tension between concrete and ethereal became my metaphor for the perceptual tension between looking and touching, comprehension and intuition evoked by the word haptic. My next series of Braille paintings focused on the writing of Lewis Carroll, who managed to conflate logic, emotion, and nonsense in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  Each book consists of a short chapter where characters interact, suddenly change, or disappear, and each of my paintings is made of one chapter’s pages, with their iconography and color choices expressing the characteristics and motifs (card games, chess) of Lewis’s narratives.