Depth(Verde Memoria)
Depth(Verde Memoria) · 2026 · Mixed Media on Paper · 7 x 5 in.
A hand-cut, bilaterally symmetrical form in black and violet layered over a richly textured terre verte painted ground, arriving at ancestral glyphs and totemic marks at intimate studio scale.
- Medium
- Mixed Media on Paper
- Substrate
- Paper
- Dimensions
- 7 x 5 in.
- Edition
- Unique
- Status
- Available
- Inventory
- AX-2026-005
- Scale
Drawn to scale from the recorded dimensions, against a sofa. Not a photograph of an installation.
From the series Before Words
The ground of this work is terre verte, green earth, a clay pigment that has been in continuous use since ancient Rome. In Byzantine icon painting, it was the standard underpainting color for every human face. Before the flesh tones of Christ, the saints, and the holy figures were applied, a layer of terre verte was painted beneath them. It is the color hidden under the surface of every Byzantine sacred face, invisible in the finished icon, the foundation that makes the visible image possible. You cannot see it. It holds everything.
Over that hidden ground, a lavender rectangle. Over the lavender, a black cut form, fluid and bilateral, with extensions that move like water in depth, not at the surface. Tyrian purple, the historical source of violet and lavender pigments, was the most expensive colorant in the ancient world, produced from the mucus of sea snails and reserved for royalty, for the sacred, for the boundary between the mortal and the divine.
Verde Memoria, green memory. The terre verte beneath this work is the same hidden foundation that held the faces of saints for a thousand years of Byzantine painting.