I have had a habit of refining and developing, repeating, distorting, and re-inventing my visual ideas, throughout my time as an artist, just to see where they might lead.
This drawing for a symbol of stepped-pyramid type mountains, reminiscent of the Mayan pyramids I visited and explored in Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula and in Guatemala, was the incredibly simple beginning of a project which became my focus over a period of half a dozen years. The "Mountain Series", as I've referred to all the works made during my travels throughout the territoties of pre-Columbian civilizatios, began as travel studies and lead to many subsequent works on paper and on canvas.
A light weight Japanese brush, dipped in Sennelier egg tempera, touched this sheet of paper three times. The same brush traveled, in my backpack, throughout seven countries, over four years, and was used to paint close to two hundred paintings, before it's animal hairs and bamboo handle became lost to time, like the great American civilizations, whose art I was studying as I traveled.
ARTIST'S COMMENTARY
"Symbol of Mountains"
?24 x 36 in.?
egg tempera on heavy paper
1985
All projects have a beginning: a seed, so to speak, for the tree.