2369 is the street # of my studio address...

I have titled the newest version of this book "Remainders" since the photographs focus on all the things left over after creating my art. However, although they may have started as remainders, by pairing them with other remainders, they have a new life joined as one whole.



http://www.blurb.com/books/2563487



Please understand, I am not a writer; but this is my attempt to give a verbal introduction to a visual book.

I cannot hope to understand or fully appreciate how any writer, especially great writers, go about creating a book. This is a visual book; no writing, just pictures. The pictures are meant to stimulate both a visceral and a verbal response; an engagement on both a gut and an intellectual level.



I created this book in much the same way as I create one of my paintings. And just like one of my paintings, I preferred not to have a fixed idea about what the book was to be about or exactly what kind of book I wanted it to be. I wanted to keep my mind and eyes open looking to create something new or make some original discoveries.



It all started on a gray day, which seemed to drive me to depression (not unusual; I don't much like gray days). It was not a clinical depression; just a self-indulgent convenient malaise. It was a depression more like what Vladimir Nabokov describes in a passage from the book Lolita when he writes: "... and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries." although I might easily be accused of being overly dramatic if I had penned those words about myself.



But then, just as many of my painting go through stages of “gray,” the more I worked on this book the more magic I experienced. Even the "dead” flowers that I had photographed the first day, I revisited 3 days later to discover that a wonderful white lily had risen out of the tangle of dead leaves.



As I photographed and reviewed the detritus of my life, the "mess" of my creative life at my studio, the photographs made everything more tangible and manageable; and I even began to have a vision of hope. Then as I paired photographs of my past and present, they started to form new connections. I began to understand that by forging new relationships between objects or photographs, a whole new world of optimism opened up. Through these innovative connections, hopelessness was replaced with not only hope, but with a new world and a new life.



I have titled the book "Remainders" since it really does focus on all the things left over after the creating of my "art" (the "detritus" of my life in the studio).



Remainders that include, (but are certainly not limited to):

• paint left over on palettes;

• photographs of models used and unused for my art;

• object for inspiration that I've collected;

• the tools I use to create my art; including rags, brushes, and unused paint;

• photographs referencing people, feelings, moments and events;

• photographs that give me a "feeling" that I've hoped to put into my paintings;

• photographs of paintings that I continue to use as inspiration;

• objects I've created solely for myself;

• books, drawings, paintings, posters, postcards; all used for inspiration and ideas;

• the "mess" I constantly leave behind in my efforts to create

These (and many more) are the constantly growing "Remainders" of my creative life; and by pairing each of these remainders with another across the page, I’ve tried to give them a new life.



Gerrit