Notes on Sight Lines V: Hide and Seek

 
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Hide and Seek gets its name from the Phillips Collection's William Merritt Chase painting of child play (far left). I have taken that and two other works involving children and combined them into a game of hide and seek. The center back image is a modified John Singer Sargent family portrait of the Boit daughters at the MFA in Boston. On the left is Henry James as a painter illustrating his novella, The Turn of the Screw. William Merritt Chase's game of hide and seek has turned into a dark game of blind man's bluff. This is causing some of the paintings' children to flee their canvases to escape the touch of the lurching blindfolded girl.

There is also personal autobiography. The blindfolded girl has knocked over a collection of the intaglio tools which I stopped using in 2007. My own Victoria's Children starts emptying out at the far right. A fleeing shadow is emerging out of a Homage to the Square by Josef Albers. And so it goes. For the sake of the delicate mists of suggestion and atmosphere, which are too easily scattered by explication, I thought it best to leave the rest to the forgiving whims of the viewer.

The edition of 90 prints is divided between a small version (19 x 30 inches) numbered 1-45/90 and a larger version (23 x 38 inches) numbered 46-90/90.