Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Asylum (oil on canvas, 2008)


This is a building (one of many) from the old Foxboro State Mental Hospital in Foxboro, MA. I used to work near here and would make drawings of these buildings on my lunch break. There was a security guard in a white van who told me that I wasn't allowed to draw the buildings because they were going to be auctioned off by the state (I never quite found the logic in that, and right before I moved to Maine, the complex had been sold and the buildings were being demolished) and she used to case me off all the time. I did a painting of this when I still lived in MA, but I was never really happy with it so I did this from memory, incorporating more textural paint application, intense colors and a different composition. In retrospect, I think the color in the sky was influenced as much by Giorgio DiChirico's work as the cover to Pink Floyd's "Animals" album.

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