The Construction Site
During my foundational year at RISD, I’d walk about with my roommate John Murphy looking for interesting cast offs and urban junk. He discovered a dumpster full of city architectural detritus and a large sheaf of inspection photographs of a VT water treatment site under construction. These he generously passed along to me and I eventually began using the black and white 8x10 glossy prints in a series of paintings. I transpose the photos onto scrap boards I found at building sites. These semi-documentary images were my first attempts connect painting with the physical world they depicted. They became for me, personal metaphors of construction and deconstruction.