paintings and ceramic panels inspired by the cosmatesque pavements of Rome.
The passge of sunlight, casting into relief and tracing its daily path across the worn surfaces, the pavements and floors of ancient buildings has captured my attention for some years. In these works Rome’s Cosmatesque pavents, provide the impetus for further reflection on the nature of time and human expereince, that has been the deeper subject of my work since retuning to painting.
The precious marble cladding and columns of Romes classical ruins were already over a thousand years old during the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Cosmati craftsmen produced these complex genmetical pavments in the city’s papal basilicas. Over centuries of human traffic, cycles of construction and reconstruction, development, decay, they have been worn, polished and scared by the feet of clerics and the faithful. The dreams and sorrows of high and low can be traced in their remains. In the interlinking of square and circle the human temporality is met by the eternal.
The paintings are all accurate representations of pavements in specific basilicas. They range in size from the vast papal basilica of San Giovanni in Laterno, to the diminutive San Benedetto in Piscinula. Though I have taken occasional liberties with other architectural elements in some of these buildings, I have sought to represent the special character of invitation with which each one enfolds the visitor.
T.S. Elliot’s reflections on the patterning of human experience in time elaborated in the Four Quartets provide not just the titles, but also the contemplative under pinning of these paintings and ceramics in my own experiences of life, loss, exploration, discovery and love.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, of dead and living. Not the intense moment, isolated, with no before and after, but a lifetime burning in every moment. And not the lifetime of one man only but of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
T. S. Elliot
While the serpentine guilloche and quincunx motifs of these pavements are saturated in theological and liturgical significance, they were also the product of decorative traditions going back through Islamic and Byzantine sources to classical antiquity. Here was an opportunity for me to return to the medium of ceramic tiles and to explore a more decorative interplay of text and pattern
At the still point of the turning world
There the dance is… and there is only the dance
T. S. Elliot
Fragments of Elliot’s text, the trace of bud and leaf, the imprint of a discarded sundial now fired and glazed reflect the passing light in different ways. In laying out these patterns, crafting shaping and piecing them together I feel a closer to, but humbled by the breath taking artistry of these long dead artisans whose lives and work now play their part in mine.
Love is most nearly itself, when here and now cease to matter.
… In my end is my beginning
T. S. Elliot. East Coker