Birth in Venice: Encounter Morandi
In 1998, my visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Venice sparked a transformative encounter with Giorgio Morandi's exhibit of his late works. Morandi's simple yet profound paintings resonated with me in ways I couldn't fathom. Until then, I'd only appreciated highly realistic art, believing it to be the epitome of artistic skill. However, Morandi’s intimate, obsessive still lifes shattered that perception and changed everything for me.
The first time I saw the Morandi show, I felt ecstatic. I rushed out into the Venetian landscape and painted small works, with an emphasis on negative space and a sense of touch between forms. The second time, I experienced a newfound sense of comprehension, as if the paintings had already said everything there was to express, leaving me feeling deeply understood, as if I had made the paintings, expressing something I had been longing to say.
Morandi's show wasn't just about art; it challenged my perceptions and redefined what it means to create. During that same summer studying abroad with Pratt Institute, I also met the late Dick Rubens, professor, and mentor, whose definition of art helped me understand why it was that I responded to the seemingly simple still lifes. "You think to yourself. You are a thinker. Who listens while you think? The listener within each thinker. Art gets to that listener (that receiver of thoughts)." This expectation, and understanding of the ineffable interior plane, as Rubens suggested, became the driving force behind why I painted.
The thinker, as a signifier, responds to anything that gets it thinking, moving. Movement—motion—emotion. The listener, as a receiver of thoughts, grasps a kind of silence that is beyond movement: stillness. The paradox in painting is the simultaneous existence of what is objective and what is not. The real paradox at hand here also turns out to be the real metaphor. Ultimately, the real paradox is that of the thinker and listener existing simultaneously, and it is those specific metaphysical implications that I am still obsessed with.
Painted in 1998, these works were created in Venice right after I saw the Morandi show.