Jupiter and Thetis Ingres 1811 Musée Granet Aix en Provence
I often visited the Musée Granet in Aix. Influenced by what i saw, I thought I needed to prove to myself that I could paint like the "Maîtres",and started a self portrait.
I wasn't satisfied, sure it was "impressive", but for me it lacked something. I new there was another way. Titien had found his "sfumato" using transparent glazes which corresponded with the layering in my colored pencil drawings, so I started a portrait of my mother after the photograph of Ansel Adams thinking that Ansel's zone system and Titian's sfumato technique had a lot in common.
My Mother after Ansel Adams photograph
My painting got interupted by a commission for a mosiac in a swimming pool at the home of Emmanuelle Arsan In the mountains above St. Tropez. The mosiac was done using over 70,000 pieces of glass and took almost a year to execute.
Swiming pool mosaic with Emmanuelle Arson
Back in Aix i continued to paint my mother's portrait and my self portrait and at the same time painted absracts using "taches" of paint, as if they were atoms. I imagined myself as an atom and painted what I saw around me, other atoms(my mother was a physicist and on the team who initially split the atom in Berkeley). This was my way of trying to understand better what I was seeing. In the summer of 1978 I was commissioned to paint the maternity ward in the hospital at Pertuis not far from Aix, on 500 square meters of wall I painted "birth" with the perspective of an atom.
Maternity Pertuis France 1978
