MT/World Renaissance Series
These works are both a visual pleading and a celebration to the Divine for an understanding/thanks of/for the obsession that had consumed me since I first laid eyes on the bewitching/beguiling Maria-Teresa Natta. She was the assistant to the MTS World Renaissance’s Chief Purser, a seven hundred passenger cruise ship upon which I had accepted, mid-cruise, a position to replace the sickly number two photographer.
As we, weekly, sailed up the Queen Charlotte Sound towards the various ports of Alaska - Juneau, Wrangell, Skagway, I painted away in my makeshift studio that I had set up in our over-sized darkroom. I was twenty-two and unversed in the nuanced ways of seduction and openness to others. I poured my confusion and desire and ache into these works in an attempt to both expunge and understand the torrent of feelings that threatened to drown me. We traversed, Teresa and I, for many years and across multiple countries, the convoluted and heady pathways of connection, rejection, acceptance, desire, lust, willingness, pairing, separateness, joy and heartache that are the foundations and side-effects and out-gassings of “love.”
I left life at sea after three years and accepted an offer of employment from the Mussavi Arts Center in New York City, a place I called home for over thirty years. Whilst I was busy creating and establishing a different version of myself (sometimes with, but mostly without, my muse who eventually went back home to Italy) this portfolio of work ended up being stowed away in a storage facility in Upstate New York. There it remained for decades until I rediscovered it a couple of years ago.
I immediately reconnected with the energy of my former self, with my stubbornness and obsession - true, but also with my focus and willingness to gamble and a sense of playfulness and what I took to be unsullied and unequivocal love.
I wanted, therefore, to catalogue and reassess these visual outpourings and to finally put them out there for the world to see.
They are available (from the tab - Print Shop) as limited edition (of 12) Giclee prints in two sizes - A3+ and 430mm x 700mm. The originals are also available - please contact me directly for details.
