| Continuing
the direction of my prior work, of using the formal possibilities
I’d absorbed from Post-painterly Abstraction, and inspired
in particular by Donald Judd’s Minimalist stacked boxes and
Gerhard Richter’s color swatches, it occurred to me to photograph
commercial paint samples—selected, cut up and reassembled from
those offered by the Treasure Tones paint company. The images are
derived from themes typical of sentimental Pictorialist photography.
Like the Pictorialists’ photographs, these pieces are inspired
by painting, and in the most literal sense, they are photographs
of paint. |
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I made
the first version of Treasure Tones in 1975 as a set of 3¼"×4¼" Polaroids.
The Polaroid version of Flower
Garden was reproduced and discussed in Jonathan Green’s
critical history, American Photography 1945 to the Present, and
the Polaroid Pink
Masterpiece was reproduced as the poster image for
the Visual Studies Workshop's traveling exhibition, Visual Articulation
of Idea Through Photography. In 1984 I rephotographed the original
paint samples to make a set of Kodak Ektaflex prints that were exhibited
at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. In 1989 I reprinted
several Treasure Tones as Kodak Duraflex prints. The Duraflex
version of Flower
Garden was exhibited and reproduced in the the catalogs
of William Ewing's Flora Photographica and Hans-Michael Herzog's Blumenstücek
Kunststücke. In 2009 I scanned the original paint samples to make
a set of digital-pigment prints ranging in size from 16"×24" to
24"×36". Computer processing now gives me the color
control I need to make these pieces look the way I’d always wanted.
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