GROUND BREAKAGE PAINTINGS
"Here, I use reclaimed industrial paint to set, dry, and reverse found paint from an existing surface onto stretched linen. I employed this technique when I was recently forced to leave my studio. I decided to take the space with me. I reversed onto my canvas the topmost drywall, flooring paint, and wood surfaces, which included my own spilled paint marks, footprints, loose brush bristles, staples, bits of cut canvases, dust, overspray, and trace gouges in the floor and walls where earlier I had knifed through paintings. In doing this, I preserve a history of my artistic enterprise in the space, but also rip away the remnants of my efforts. The gesture and the resulting art could be seen as at once defiant and redemptive, destructive and transformative."
-James Gortner, New American Paintings 2017