The packing of 308 paintings was at last completed by 1:00pm today… in utter exhaustion. We carried them down and out of the studio and off to the shippers, hooray. What a load off (and special thanks to Laura Cortes-Hesselbach and Cristobal Garcia).
It was nice to see them all off so that I could at last feel like I would have a few days of final contemplation of this fantastic city… but at the same time, I am also excited to see the final piece come to fruition back in Denver in the next month. In my talks with Tatiana Cuevas, she had suggest that I photograph the pieces not just as images, but as objects, which I did and quite like….
This notion of them as artifacts—fragments of this ruin of paintings that I produced.
With this, Carla Herrera-Pratts, whom I have been working with from the start of the program, had mentioned this idea of grouping the works in a visual or thematic when when I get to working on the book. I am rather looking forward to looking back at the bulk of the paintings and seeing where imagery and themes repeat themselves and what this will tell me about my experience here in Mexico these past number of weeks. I feel that there is much to learn from this.