While I was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2008, I spent many hours in my two favorite Borromini churches, Santo Ivo della Sapienza and San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. At first I sat quietly in my favorite spot, concentrating on doing watercolors and drawings of the interiors. After a few visits, however, I found myself circling round and round the spaces, looking up in the domes and beyond, into their lanterns.
It occurred to me then that taking pictures would give me a new way of understanding what I was seeing. Although photography, much as I enjoy it, is not my usual way of making art, I found that it helped me comprehend these wonderfully complex structures. When I gazed upward through my camera lens, I felt a dizzying disorientation; the undulating surfaces of the domes captivated me and kept me returning to these churches again and again, as often (given what tends to happen in Rome) as they would let me in.
Because I had been exploring light and lightness in my paintings, the
elusive, ever changing dance of light in these two Baroque churches teased and enticed me with continuous but varying games for the eye. I discovered, using my camera to play these visual games at different times of the day and season, that the light in the two churches is not the same: in Sant Ivo, the entire dome seems bathed in a white glow, while the dome of San Carlo is mysteriously illuminated, its imposing oval mass containing a wildly fluid and rich complexity of forms.
What began as a painting project has developed into an obsession with photography as a way of penetrating these two soaring, enigmatic spaces.
I'm not finished yet.
