I lived in Italy for a time before I came here... that was over a decade ago...
I adore Italian culture... but life in Venice was an intensely mediated experience.
Acres of gilding ...alters and triptychs ...cut stones and bones ...angels and puttis ...pastries & shiny tiny spoons ...so many wickets for tickets & styled food ...countless madonnas rising through tempra clouds ...eroded frescoes with endless foldings of flowing drapery ...undulating walks up and down a thousand bridges ...thin towels and cold marble floors ...constantly turning corners ...vaulted basilicas with the sounds all wrong ...sitting in rococo chairs and neighborhood squares ...I felt I had been stuffed to the back of the Medieval junk drawer ...people still talked about the plague! The only open landscapes lay suffocating in the corners of Bellini’s panel paintings... ..one morning I had enough I was saturated with cultural beauty... my wild heart had been hammered thin as a piece of gilding gold by the weight of visual history ...I had to get home so like Giacometti’s woman I walked.
Now I live here at the beach ...a tiny spark of consciousness in a place of wild natural beauty... returned to my childhood landscape...
it is this landscape that now participates in my inner and outer world and is the subject of my photographic work.
