In 1960 I was painting calligraphic images of cursive script. The "writing" was not readable. My paintings were abstract images of paragraphs. In time, I began adding images of paintings: generic still lifes and landscapes and figure paintings. It was my intention that the image would be immediately recognized as an image of a painting so I chose familiar paintings for quotation: Millet's The Man with a Hoe, English and Dutch portraits, Chardin still lifes, Constable landscapes. My painting created an image of an illustration with a paragraph of associated text: "Composition with Illustration."
By the mid-Sixties I was making paintings of paintings, paintings that, instead of writing, had paintings by earlier artists as their subject. I sometimes repeated the image of the same quoted painting on one canvas, sometimes juxtaposed images from two or more different quoted paintings Positioning the image of the quoted painting on a one-color ground I provided a self-defining border for the composition.
George Deem
1993.
