When I first began to study vision in connection with my art studies in New York in the early 70's, I became fascinated with windows and mirrors. At that time there were a number of Super realist or Photo realist artists, especially Richard Estes, Chuck Close and Audrey Flack, who used photographs to make paintings, especially of store windows with multiple reflections, that caught my eye. Lucien Day, my very kind friend and owner of the SOHO Green Mountain Gallery was a photo realist who painted on shaped canvasses. Amazing, detailed work, but painted reflections never felt real to me.
At various art openings I caught myself looking out gallery windows in preference to the art on the walls. So I started a series of window paintings.
I soon noticed that when we look out a window or into a mirror, our right eye sees more of the left side of the scene and the left eye more of the right side of the scene due to our binocular vision. And the image we see seamlessly merges those additional visual strips with the middle portion of the scene that both eyes can see. (Experience: If you quickly shut one eye then the other, you will become aware of the added strips seen through a window or mirror).
These window paintings were one more step away from both photography and painting in search of a more real art form: relief.
Below is a slide show of my early New York window paintings and early window reliefs (1973-1978).
We moved to Cape Cod in October 1978. Beginning in 1981 I continued work on window reliefs, experimenting with many relief materials. Here is a selection of my Cape Cod window reliefs (1981-1995).
In 1996 I began making intaglio (negative) reliefs. I am still exploring intaglio relief today. Here are some of my window/mirror intaglio reliefs