Mixed Media: Connecticut

1980, Self Portrait. Oil, egg tempera, and collage on panel.

For this piece, I took a photograph of my existential depression and at a local copy shop got separate printouts for each of the yellow, magenta, cyan and black process colors.  Then I built up a collage from scraps of cloth and wood, gessoed it and began painting.  The first layers were in egg tempera, following the color guides of my xerox prints.  The final layers were in oil. 

I remember very well tossing it down the long deep well of a garbage recycling plant before moving on to California, myself looking back up at me, just before the huge careening steel piston smashed it into unrecognizable smithereens.  1981. The end of an era...