process

This painting, which I refer to as a variation on Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, now hangs in Jami's office. I worked several years on this painting, off and on, rolling it up and putting it away only to unroll it and work on it - I alternately hoped and despaired over it. For over a year it was in Casey Thompson's apartment in The Village. And when he left CTS I rolled it up to put it out of my mind: I thought that I would gesso over it and painting something new on the canvas one day. And so it was, when I moved into my studio in Decatur, that I unrolled it, restretched it and began to work on it again. And what happened is that I figured out what to do in the middle of the canvas. The bottom is the final and current state.
Among the curiosities about this painting now, is that I've stretched it and restretched it so often that in the final stretch, I discovered that it was no longer square. The black edge along the bottom that tapers along the side going up s an attempt to reconcile this offness in the finished piece.