"The Lost Painting: One."
This is the only image I have of this painting. This image was a scan of a Polaroid of the painting that was scanned and printed on crappy printer paper. It was 8 feet by 8 feet, oil on canvas. It had a sister painting, "The Lost Painting: Two," which was also 8 feet by 8 feet, and of which I also have the similar non-archivally-sound photographic remnants. I worked on this painting for several months of my junior year at RISD, during the entire spring semester of 2003. I built the canvas inside the center room of the What Cheer Building on Benefit Street, stretched and primed it during the end of wintersession when no students were yet in the building, and laid claim to my spot, as that room was to be used for critiques only and not work -- yet, I did not have adequate space in my small cubicle in the adjacent room to work on an 8-by-16-foot oil painting. I holed up in that room for the duration of the semester, working on "The Lost Painting: One" and "...Two," and when there was a crit for others than myself, I would slide it out of the way of their work as best as I could. This painting started with this scene, five nude women in bright lights in front of and inside of a strange expressionist cityscape. It later became a more abstract piece that depicted floating orbs with small figures on them flying in and out of representational consciousness and unsconsiousness, but you could still see these figures. At the end of the semester, I had a successful crit, but I could not move the paintings to my new apartment on Benefit Street, and I left both paintings in the studio for posterity. I hope that they fostered other paintings somehow, whether from being cut up to be used for smaller pieces, or if maybe someone else built upon the pieces. I never found out what happened to them, but I would like to recreate them soon.
