My primary intention for the painting was to create an open abstract space of saturated color and flickering light that the viewers feel as though they want to “enter”. I have been making these Doorway like paintings, since 2007, but this painting is by far the most intense and visually complex, which I think is making it so appealing to people!
The original inspiration for these types of Doorway paintings came from being blown away by a Fra Angelico exhibit at the Met Museum a while ago. He was an Italian painter and Dominican Friar working in the early 1400’s, and I noticed that in nearly every painting, he would include an open doorway. It was so curious to me, and I began to understand these painted doorways symbolically as a space of “potential” in his paintings. Meaning, he gives us the narrative of people interacting and telling a story, and then places a doorway next to it to represent an “open door” to other narratives, or other people entering or exiting the scene. People often discuss paintings as “windows” into other worlds. But I wanted to do more than look through a window-like painting…I wanted to give a full-body experience of feeling like you could walk into the painting.. I had not seen painters addressing this doorway idea, so it felt like a unique way to continue the conversation, in an abstract form.
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