In the spring of 1994, I decided to make some paintings about the Venetian artists whose work has meant so much  to me...I began by painting an

Ode to the Venetian Artists...
Theirs was a hunger for
Substance: ripe fruit, a
woman's breast, riches
of the east and the sea,
velvet and gold.  As
much, too, as the passion
and nuance of the senses,
was the desire for knowledge.
Poised between the
metaphysics of the Middle
Ages and the materialist
science of the age to come,
their magic was science,
their science magic.  An
art of splendor, opulence, and
grandeur... and in every
shadow was decay, ruin and loss.

I painted the first two paintings of the series the same day I made the "Ode."  They were about Giorgione, whose "Dresden Venus,"  "Fete Champetre" and "Three Philosophers" have always meant so much to me.  They were "about" Giorgione but were in no way imitations or copies.  Instead, I only thought, "I love Giorgione," and the painted in the way that--with the enormous arousal of sensual energies and artistic ambitions due to my marriage to Stephanie Dudek the year before--I then loved to paint.

After Giorgione, I went to Titian.  His "Sacred and Profane Love"  has always been at the top of my "masterpieces" list, and so, using method I had devised for Giorgione, I made my own "Sacred and Profane..."--the Titian Diptych.  There is another element in my Titian story, however, and in the origin of these paintings.

It comes from the mid 1950's, when I was making small landscapes in oil on panel.  They began because I wanted to travel but had a family to raise and a house to repair and a full time job and travel was completely impossible.  I found a copy of the "Landscape Annual of 1831" in an old book store, and copied pictures from its engravings of Italy.  One was of Titian's House, with a quote from Titan's dinner invitation to Sansovino.  I made a large painting--now in the Mr. and Mrs. Albert Churchill Collection in Piedmont--of how I imagined the feast.  When I went to Titian here, in 1994, I tried to recreate at least some of that feast along with the pairing of the two forms of eros--the Domestic and the Transcendent--that I think Titian's "Sacred and Profane" is about..

*

After Titian, it would be Veronese, whose Wedding Feast at Cana has always been very important to me--especially for the sky in back of the feast.  I made these two to honor that sky.

** Titian Diptych, left side        

Veronese I
April 23, 1994

Titian Diptych, right side
       (for Sacred and Profane Love)
       April 22, 1994
Collection Stephanie Dudek,
Montreal, Canada

Veronese II
May 3, 1994

Then it was Tintoretto.  I have never forgotten a Life Magazine issue illustrated with Tintoretto's San Rocco images published one Christmas sometime when I was a teenager.  It was the rising sweeping diagonal ascent of his Road to Calvary that did it, and hung in my mind for decades as the image our our ascent not to heaven (I guess what Tintoretto meant) but to the knowledge and glory and terror of the flesh.  In the full flush of my 1994 springtime, I tried to make the image of my memory of adolescence, of Tintoretto, and of the resurrection of the flesh my marriage had brought about.

The first of my Tintoretto's was simply the Centurion's waving banner.  I made it as a diptych, with sides nearly touching... the waving banner of the life of flesh in time.

I made two more of Tintoretto's "Road to Calvary," the first simply as a resurrection, the second in memory not only of Tintoretto but also of the Cathedral at Torcello and the tomb under the altar there.  I had been in a tomb for almost ten years after the death of my first wife.  My marriage to Stephanie Dudek resurrected me.  My third Tintoretto was the image of my resurrection.

There were only two more "Venetians."  The first came from remembering a calendar picture my family had framed under glass in our living room when I was a child--a late 19th-early 20th Century painting of the Venetian Lagoon with fishing boats and sails glowing in the sunset.  The painting came from that and from realizing that all we do as painters is spread color on a passing--and fading--sail. 
I gave the painting a text--

“Of themes of Life and Death remained
only a Sail Passing in the Sunset.”

The last "Venetian" came more from Redon's "Blue Boat with Yellow Sail" than from Venice.  Unlike Redon's my boat was yellow, the sail was black and the theme was pain and death--
I looked in my notebook for what I had written about the painting when I was painting it.  I found that at first I had written, on the painting itself,

“What would you etch in stone,
What would you leave forever?
The great themes of life and death…
and the painter shows
only a sail passing in the sunset.

Later, covering that up, and getting specific,

 “Grooves, hurts, patterns of pain
deep in the heart;
Marks, cut, hatred repeated…
Only love against
the horde of hate,
only human light
against the flood of dark.”