| The Truro paintings represent the only thing remotely like a series that I’ve done. One of them appears behind Cameron Diaz in the beginning of “The Holiday” which was exciting, but also ironic. To think that a painting I was that anxious about would end up in a Hollywood film… I painted the first of these views on a very windy, but sunny afternoon on Cape Cod in May, 2005. I don’t paint on location as much as I used to, but I’m glad that this “series” was started by a piece made in situ. It was challenging to stand in the sand by a still-deserted row of cottages along the highway in Truro and try to do something that involved the ocean and the sky and the beach. In some ways I felt ridiculous, far more naked than when I paint outside in Europe. The sky on that trip was terrifically active, but there was an empty or melancholy feeling and I think some of that comes off in the painting. I don’t think this composition would have come about had I not stumbled on the Josef Albers show at the Museo Morandi in Bologna just a few months before ending up on the Cape. Seeing Albers and Morandi next to each other, very unexpectedly, in a space I know well, encouraged a moment of reflection on my own work; I saw clearly that I should simplify some of my compositions to allow the color to become more distinct, more of an obvious subject. It was a huge realization that has affected both my abstract and representational work and I will always see the Truro paintings as the beginning of a more distilled and articulate approach to color. |
