“A grisaille is a painting executed entirely in shades of grey or of another neutral greyish colour. It is particularly used in large decorative schemes in imitation of sculpture.” – Wikipedia (2018)
I wonder about grisaille painting being used “in imitation of sculpture,” but have seen it as a way for representational painting to become less illusionistic, to reach another degree of distillation.
After exploring the photographic images in this "Grisaille" set initially in color, I decided to develop them further as grayscale images for this reason: I was finding the color dramas in many of them reductive – they were obscuring some other dramas in the images that I wanted to see more clearly, and at the same time impeding the perception of some interesting correlations among the images.
When I began selecting the mixed images to include in this set, in 2016, I was looking for ones that would together help me continue exploring the kinds of form – or questions of form – I had become most interested in, after looking at architecture and other designed things, over time, during my life as an architect. At first, I imagined that the set might include illustrations of something like the underlying patterns Christopher Alexander and his associates studied, wrote about, and then partially illustrated in their book "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction." More recently, I realized that the images I wanted to include in my study-set were not going to be good illustrations of such defined and normative patterns as Alexander’s. They were more ambiguous or open-ended. Each one seemed to represent a dramatic range of underlying patterns in play, intertwined with one another, strangely formed and forming, unresolved – with the different kinds of patterns arising in the composition of the scene and its elements and its image – as I was looking at it. And there was also the play of patterns and their alternatives arising in continuing to study these images together. I think it was that evolving complex of interacting and unresolved patterns in play that was making me want to keep experiencing and exploring these images together in a set.
The 63 images in this “Grisaille 3” set are organized in a sequence of 21 mixed-image triplets, which I imagine running frieze-like around the four walls of a viewing space, suspended in an image array without a clear story-line or sequence.
