The Giotto Series (1986-1988) - This is a series of seven paintings based on Giotto di Bondone’s frescos he painted in the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel narrating the stories of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. I created the paintings as a site-specific installation in the Octagonal Gallery at the Williams College Museum in 1988. Using images from Giotto’s original paintings and requiring the integration of my paintings with the architecture of the museum’s gallery, the series was painted on shaped canvases, six of which were at least eleven feet tall; the seventh measured eighteen by twenty-four feet.

“Initially I just wanted to dissect [Giotto’s frescoes] as a formalist, and see how he was making those paintings work. But then as I started working on the studies, what I wanted was to recreate the process he went through. Giotto was extremely modern for his time. But I didn’t want to do a 600-year-old concept. I knew I needed to find the shapes of the canvases. The paintings are operating on a lot of levels at once: formal, iconographic. Then there was a psychological element and a personal element. Ultimately the project took on a life of its own, Using the Giotto’s as a departure point for a cycle of paintings that had their own spiritual significance to me . . . I found myself questioning through the paintings the nature of time, sequence, gravity, space, dimensions, authenticity and cause and effect.”