I was keen to make work out in the city, gravitating to the river and working on the banks of the Tiber. It is a marginal space and the kind of place artists often find themselves. I cut and punctured my canvasses in contact with the broken masonry scattered along the banks, washed them in the river and carried them back to the school to dry. I was establishing a working relationship with the city connected with what I had seen in the frescoes at Palazzo Massimo and in Ravenna. It was clear to see how art forms from one culture were absorbed and reworked by another. Within a more contemporary context I was awareness of the presence of Henry Moore at the Etruscan Museum in Tarquinia and the American painter Philip Guston was with me at Ostia Antica. I was coming to understand that I was a part of a continuity of artists responding to the past in order to develop new
forms in the present.
Green wallspine, 2019
Stura contact painting, detail, Ex Roma, APT Gallery 2019
Simon in the BSR Studio