Ancienne Ligne
This piece has personal meaning for me. It comes from a place I know well, but what drew me to it was not nostalgia exactly. It was the strange presence of the structure itself — industrial, functional, and unadorned, but somehow full of atmosphere.
I’m interested in the complexity of these industrial forms. They are not designed to be beautiful. They are built to serve a purpose, to hold, process, move and contain. But because of that, they have a kind of honesty. Nothing is decorative, and yet the shapes, shadows, pipes, tanks, platforms and surfaces create their own accidental beauty.
As I painted it, the structure seemed to be emerging out of mist. That became important to the feeling of the work. It is solid and mechanical, but also slightly dreamlike, as if it is appearing from memory rather than simply sitting in front of me.