"Its Very Italian"
Senior Show Artists Statement:
“Into Dark Lands, Under Strange Moons”
The title of the show comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, a book I read at an early age, but only recently reread. This quote is the desire to leave the comfort and steady pace of normal life, to see and experience something far different- this for me was Italy. Each piece in the show is the desire to travel, to foreign lands, with history and customs different from ours rushing by. Fighting through crowded crooked streets to lose your breath in front of a masterpiece of architecture, trying to capture that sense of awe is what this show intends to show. This goes back to trips in the family car as a child, I’d imagine great castles sitting over the fields or behind trees with pinnacles reaching up to claw the sky, or proud Roman ruins crumbling over the blue hills in the distance.
While I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, I’m drawn back to the old world, of stone and marble. It took a long time for any of this really to come out in my work, and for the most part; I never attempted to tackle architecture, until I went abroad with SACI. Those three and a half months changed my views on art, and how I wanted to make my own. Outside of class work, I spent most of my time in Italy wandering around the city making drawings of the buildings and the sculptures left behind by the masters that cast shadows on art for the last 500 years and beyond. My sketches, photos and impression from those places made a huge impression on my work, and provided me with a great deal of source material that I am still working from.
Carrying over from the Città Series, this show’s language is still the Italian Peninsula ranging from Roman to Baroque. These paintings and prints depict powerful buildings, both secular and religious. The main difference between this show and my past work with this subject is the use of painting as another media to get the same effect as the monotype process. I chose acrylic specifically to be able to experiment with many works in a short time, keeping the monochrome black to mimic the monotypes, which accompany the paintings. With Monotypes, I start working with brayers and razors, using pallet knives when begin the paintings to reflect that process.
Within the show, there are a group of pieces dealing with the Black Plague that came to Europe in 1348. Many cities across the world were sticken by it, but this series deals with the plague's effect on architecture. Of these myriad victims, Siena and San Gimignano were permanently scarred by the disease, which colors any visit to them even today. Two of the most haunting images from my experience were the empty towers in San Gimignano, looming over a population that is still lower than what it was before the plague hit, and Siena's unrealized cathedral, whose workers were struck down as they tried to enlarge it.
Another theme dealt with throughout the show is ruins. It is striking that although a city can thrive, certain areas within that city can become dilapidated. Even though Rome grew larger and grander in the Middle Ages, its foundations in the Forum rotted away. Those prints and paintings dealing with the subject are Roman, coming from the Forum and Pompeii, or in Ravenna, where Byzantine Churches and tombs echo softly in the rain.
Phil Lang
