These copies of the painting by Caravaggio were the beginning of the journey for my recent work.
I was reading Frank Stella 'Working Space', a wonderful book on abstract painting with a proposition that it opens up its notion and construction of pictorial space, something that abstract art of the time had narrowed down to the surface, by looking at the masters of the past.
I began to study flesh and how space is created through and around flesh. Flesh that is a marvel for sensation can be found in Baroque paintings and this is where I looked at.
I actually see the Baroque as space created through the form of the movement of flesh. It follows the twists and curls of flesh and objects that parallel it, like cloth and leaves.
The Baroque is 'Movement imported into mass' - Heinrich Wolfflin
Both of these studies are with soft pastels on paper and measure 60x80cm
