Edited by SUSAN CROSS

With contributions by

MARK GODFREY and JAMES RONDEAU

DelMonico Books • Prestel Munich London New York

MASS MoCANorth Adams, Massachusetts

CONTENTS

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF SPENCER FINCH

SUSAN CROSS

15

ARTWORKS

225

JAMES RONDEAU on

366 (EMILY DICKINSON’S MIRACULOUS YEAR), 2009

229

MARK GODFREY on

WEST (SUNSET IN MY MOTEL ROOM, MONUMENT VALLEY, JANUARY 26, 2007, 5:36–6:06 PM), 2007

232Index of Works Illustrated

234Selected Exhibition and Publication History

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In my mind, I can still see the jewel- like colors of the first work by Spencer Finch that I encountered—a suite of seven oval paintings (now destroyed) painted in two brilliant shades of blue, with a line of glowing white separating the fields of colors where they met. At first the works read as pure abstraction—sumptuous studies of color and their effect on one another. Yet like much of Finch’s production, the images are resolutely rep-resentational. They are carefully observed and precisely ren-dered images of his subject. It became apparent to me on closer study of the seven blue panels—and with the help of the series’ title, Sky Over the Ikarian Sea (1997) (fig. 1)—that the waxing and waning fields of light and dark blue illustrate the shifting views of sea, sky, and horizon that the mythical hero Icarus would have seen as he plummeted from his ill- fated flight toward the sun. The preponderance of cobalt blue in the first panel gradu-ally gave way to a deep, dark indigo in the final monochrome: Icarus’ last watery view before drowning.

Drawn to the dramatic story of creation and failure (themes investigated frequently in Finch’s work) and to Icarus’ seduction by the sun (also familiar to the artist), Finch traveled to the island and sea named for the tragic- heroic figure. The artist flew from Athens to the island of Leros, a path that took him directly over the spot in the Aegean Sea where Icarus died. The great effort that went into the making of the work—including Finch’s determined attempts at precision and accuracy despite the elu-sive nature of his subject—are characteristic of his working method. His firsthand observations and rigorous collection of data—often more associated with a scientific approach—result in surprisingly poetic ends. Both from the airplane and from the highest point on Leros, Finch made studies of the colors of the sky and water and then translated those color notes into paintings made from beeswax encaustic. While his choice of medium references the wax that Daedalus used to create Icarus’ wings (the same wax that melted under the heat of the sun and

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF SPENCER FINCHSUSAN CROSS

Fig. 1. Sky Over the Ikarian Sea I–VII, 1997. Beeswax, pigment, and oil on panel. Seven panels, each 47 x 70 in. (119.4 x 177.8 cm). All but one panel destroyed

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caused Icarus’ demise), the shape of the works references the nineteenth- century critic John Ruskin’s notion that the oval most closely matches the human field of vision. Through these works, then, Finch offers viewers the opportunity to imagine themselves looking through Icarus’ eyes, seeing what he saw.

At the heart of Finch’s practice is this romantic impulse to see what others have seen, and to share that impression— to accurately convey it—to a multitude. Often Finch is drawn to the idea of experiencing what certain historic figures have envisaged, and he imagines that the light of the sun is perhaps the singular phenomenon that may not have changed over the years.1 With that in mind, he has traveled to Troy to record the dawn that the Greek warrior Achilles saw, ventured to Lascaux to document the sunset that the earliest artists would have witnessed outside the now- famous caves (fig. 2), and made numerous pilgrimages to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, to experience and transcribe visually the light

she so eloquently described in her poems. Light and its color are ultimately the subjects that fascinate Finch and those that he returns to again and again—along with the perceptual, physio-logical, psychological, and linguistic workings that influence how we experience them. Like many artists and thinkers who have inspired him and who turn up in his work—scientists, art-ists, poets, and philosophers, including Monet, Turner, Newton, Dickinson, Goethe, and Wittgenstein—Finch is continuously celebrating, and grappling with, the beauty and enigmas of light and color. His mix of science and poetry is fitting for a subject that is equally tied to science and art.

Finch’s recent commission for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum adeptly articulates both the power of light and color and their elusive nature. To create Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning (2014) (p. 203), he painted by hand 2,983 watercolors, each an attempt to represent the crisp, blue sky of that historic morning, each a

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He has often turned his attention to the incidents and land-scapes that make up our collective memories—our shared experiences and history. In many cases, he taps into a particu-larly American consciousness, evoking iconic sites such as the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, as well as defining moments such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. With his seminal work Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat (1994) (p. 203), Finch created 100 pastel drawings in different shades of pink in response to the conflicting accounts of the day recorded in the Warren Commission Report. That same year, with his work Blue (Sky Over Cape Canaveral, August 31, 1994, 10:25 am) (1994) (fig. 3), Finch tried to picture a national tragedy that had been witnessed and widely televised, much like 9/11. With both, he avoided the reductive image of the explosive moment. Visiting the site where the Challenger had broken up eight years earlier, he painted the color of a one- square- kilometer area of the sky at that exact location (determined with NASA’s help). Made with the aid of a homemade siting device and numerous compli-cated triangulations and calculations, the work is a single three-

different shade of blue (and each made in memory of one of the victims of the World Trade Center bombings). The quality of the light on September 11 is burned into so many of our minds, and Finch captures that shared sense memory in stunning hues. At the same time, he deftly suggests both the imperfection of memory and the varied perspectives of each individual who witnessed or was touched by the event. For Finch, the light of the sun is a universal experience, one that is an apt metaphor of our yearning for communion and communication. And the diffi-culty in representing it is equally apt at describing the obstacles posed by all representation—and perhaps even the impossibil-ity of it. As the painter Josef Albers wrote in his influential book Interaction of Color, “If one says ‘Red’ (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different. Even when a certain color is specified which all listeners have seen innumerable times . . . they will still think of different reds.” As Albers noted: “. . . no one can be sure whether each has the same perception.”2 This is the conun-drum that Finch wrestles with.

Fig. 2. The Light at Lascaux (Cave Entrance) 9/29/2005 5:27 pm, 2005. Thirty-eight fluorescent light fixtures and lamps with filters and gel filters on clear acrylic tubes, 15 x 240 in. (38.1 x 609.6 cm). One of 3 versions. Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Promised gift of William and Ruth True

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Fig. 3. Blue (Sky Over Cape Canaveral, August 31, 1994, 10:25 am), 1994. Mixed media and acrylic on paper. Siting device: 22 x 9 x 12½ in. (55.9 x 22.8 x 31.7 cm), painting: 9½ x 9½ in. (24.1 x 24.1 cm). Collection of Roger Björkholmen, Stockholm

centimeter square of blue. The simple work powerfully conveys the absence felt in the wake of the disaster and also hints at the absurdity in trying to represent the momentous event in a sin-gle image. Instead, Finch lets our imaginations fill in what is missing; distilled in the tiny patch of color is the endlessness of the sky, the enormity of the tragedy. With this blue—blue, like the sky from which Icarus fell; blue, from the sun’s shortest wavelengths scattering off the molecules in the earth’s atmo-sphere; blue, like the heavens—Finch evokes the omnipresent witness of all human endeavors: the sun.

Finch often repeats the apocryphal last words of the painter J. M. W. Turner, who is said to have declared on his deathbed that “the sun is God.” Certainly, the sun is just as mysterious and elusive. Finch himself is always trying to get closer to it. “The sun is the ultimate goal of my work,” he has said of his practice, “—always the goal, always absent.” 3 While the blazing star is everywhere, lighting up each day (and most nights as its light reflects off the moon), it remains billions of light years away, out of reach and resistant to direct observation. (Many intrepid scien-tists of the nineteenth century blinded themselves in attempts to study it.) Yet, while the sun is a constant in our lives—the

source of the energy that sustains life, the star around which our planet revolves, as well as the calendars and clocks that order it—it is mostly, paradoxically, invisible. And its light is constantly in flux—depending on its position and the objects that absorb or reflect its light. These conditions/vicissitudes are central to Finch’s work. Thinking back to Sky Over the Ikarian Sea, it is fitting that Finch would illustrate the location of Icarus’ fall over seven panels, though more famous paintings of the subject, such as Bruegel’s, are limited to a single canvas. Finch’s series not only introduces the passing of time but also the changes that occur in his subject over time. A large number of his works are serial studies of the same subject, photographed, painted, or drawn minutes, hours, or days apart, emphasizing that nothing—not even the sun—can be represented in a single image. Like Monet’s famous paintings of Rouen Cathedral, which changed in appearance over the many times that the art-ist painted it, Finch’s works make clear that his subjects are continuously morphing, changing under the sun’s light. Like Monet, Finch includes in his titles the date and the time of day his subject was observed, marking time with his work. Indeed, time itself often becomes the subject of his practice.

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violet. With this simple experiment, Newton had unlocked a mystery that had perplexed thinkers since antiquity. Finch repeated a similar prismatic study in Troy in 2002, unraveling the colors of the dawn light that Homer had described so famously as “rosy” in the Iliad. The refracted bands of color landed on a paper that Finch held in his hand and on which he copied the same hues in watercolor (fig. 4). In a sense, many of Finch’s works reveal the palette of colors that mix to create the sun’s white light. He has reproduced a Texas sunset in fluo-rescent lamps fitted with ecstatic, candy- colored filters in green, pink, blue, yellow, and orange, and the dawn light of Troy in a starburst of deep blues, greens, oranges, reds, and violets. While Finch carefully combines the colors to achieve the quality of the original that he measures with a colorimeter, the formula can change, different colors mixed together in various combi-nations to achieve the same result.

While Finch uses a colorimeter to measure the exact hue, saturation, and level of brilliance of a given light, his skills of observation are an equally important tool. Despite the sun’s constant presence, most of us fail to notice its effects, perhaps because of its very pervasiveness. Finch’s work Berlin Light Study (Afternoon Becomes Morning, Morning Becomes Afternoon) (2013)

Just as Finch reminds us that the light of the sun is con-stantly changing, he also understands that we experience—or notice—the sun only in glimpses or at a remove. We see light as it is reflected off an object, as it illuminates an intermediary substance, or as it appears filtered through the atmosphere. We see its colors in the everyday objects that reflect or absorb its light, or in the spectacular reds and oranges of the sunset pro-duced by the scattering of those wavelengths by the earth’s atmosphere. Fittingly, Finch brings us the sun in oblique approx-imations, meticulous, but nonetheless translations: sunlight imitated by fluorescent lamps filtered with theater gels or in combinations of colored glass or in the flickering light and changing hues of glowing TV screens. Even in his traditional paint, pastel, and watercolor, it is rarely the sun’s gaseous orb that Finch reproduces but its radiation, in particular, the colors of its light.

It was Isaac Newton—in the 1670s—who first correctly the-orized that the sun’s white light is comprised of all the colors. He used a prism to refract a beam of light in a dark room, dis-persing and revealing the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet within it—the visible spectrum of light whose wave-lengths fall within a certain range between infrared and ultra-

Fig. 4. Study for Dawn (Troy), 2002. Watercolor on paper, 11¼ x 10 in. (28.6 x 25.4 cm)

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tion, or alter ego, or an “other” self. Color, too, is a complicated character, with many mysterious facets and origin stories. There is often confusion between how light produces color and how pigments, dyes, and other colorants function—as well as color produced by electronic light. There are in fact a number of mate-rials and processes that result in color sensations. There are at least fifteen known causes of color in various materials, many of these involving electrons and the absorption or emission of light.6 With Two Examples of Molecular Orbital Theory (Prussian Blue) (2005) (fig. 6), Finch explored two of the varied means to create color. In two identical, adjacent rooms, he produced the same blue hue by different methods. In the room on the left, the walls were painted white and lit with fluorescent lamps masked with blue filters. The walls of the room to the right were painted with white paint mixed with Prussian blue pigment and

(p. 32) conveys this paradox. Isolating two sections of a gallery window with identical Foamcore boxes, he framed two distinct views. He then attached colored filters to the glass in order to convert the yellowish color of the afternoon light to the bluish cast of the morning light he had measured, and vice versa. The work draws attention to the ubiquitous bath of light that per-meates—and literally colors—our environment, emphasizing the changes in hue that occur, variations that are rather dra-matic yet most often not consciously noted.

Finch’s practice embraces color in all its incarnations and variations—in its brilliance and intensity and in its extreme sub-tleties. He has captured the otherworldly azure blue of New Zealand’s Fox Glacier with dyes frozen into ice and then melted on paper. He has photographed the deep red, yellow, and purple of wilted tulip petals, and matched in acrylic the Technicolor hues of The Wizard of Oz. With equal passion, he has docu-mented in watercolor the barely gray, ochre, and blue tints of his white studio wall in the sun, and captured in pastels the sur-prising colors of his studio at night. In these Darkness drawings, Finch studied the “blackness” of the studio wall every night over a period of a month, matching in sumptuous pastel what he observed with the lights off. With the variations in color—some of the drawings verging toward brown, many toward gray, oth-ers looking positively blue—the work suggests Finch’s sensitive eye, locating color with even the lowest of light to produce it. Or perhaps it suggests the power of the mind to influence what we see. Darkness is the absence of light, and thus the absence of color. Or is it?

In Shadow (Inside Goethe’s Window, November 27, 2007, Noon) (2007) (fig. 5), Finch makes a nod to the German poet and his struggles to understand color. Goethe questioned Newton’s ideas about light and proposed that color is the result of the interplay of light and darkness. Conducting many experiments on colored shadows, Goethe construed that color could not be solely the product of light. In his own work, Finch re- created the exact hue of a shadow he noticed in Goethe’s house in Wei-mar—the house where he wrote his Theory of Colors in 1810. Finch painted a small wall by a window in the Galerie Norden-hake the same monochrome bluish gray. The restrained gesture invites us all to look more closely, while paying homage to Goethe’s contributions to our understanding of color. Despite his many incorrect theories, he laid the groundwork for a psy-chological understanding of the phenomenon, assigning partic-ular emotions to particular shades—blue, for example, inciting both “excitement and repose.” 4

Finch connects Goethe’s interest in the relationship between color and emotion to the role that the shadow often plays in literature (even Goethe’s own)5 as a symbol of repressed emo-

Fig. 5. Shadow (Inside Goethe’s Window, November 27, 2007, Noon), 2007. Acrylic on wall, dimensions variable. Site- specific project installed at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

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that connects or confuses multiple senses within the brain. With an explosion of colorful ink dots, Finch imagines what Heisen-berg’s theory about scientific observation would have looked like to the Russian novelist, who associated specific colors with letters of the alphabet.

Further complicating the nature of color, in many works Finch investigates the confounding relationship between color and language. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour, Finch poses his own questions about the limits that language imposes on our perception. While the human eye can distinguish an enormous number of hues, universally, we have only a very limited number of recognized color names, no stan-dardized system beyond the ROY G. BIV most of us learned as children and the CMYK associated with color printing. With works such as Study for a Groovy Unnameable Color (Greenish Yellow) (1997) (p. 188), Finch presents the numerous shades that fall somewhere in the continuum between green and yellow, all of which, though recognizably different, are most likely to be described as the same “greenish yellow,” unless perhaps you are reading Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color, a J Crew catalogue, or a Pantone swatch book. Finch has utilized both the Maerz/Paul

lit with unfiltered white light. The title of the work refers to the electron transfers that produce certain colors, including Prus-sian blue, as well as the blue of sapphires, and the brown in glass bottles. With this work, Finch draws our attention to the workings of color that most of us don’t even think about, that we take for granted.

Although the common factor in the various color phenom-ena is light (the simplest ingredients for color being light, mate-rial, and an observer), Finch has investigated many of the perplexing exceptions. With his Poke in the Eye series (1997) (p. 66), he has produced color sensations—disks and rings of assorted hues—by applying pressure to various parts of his eyes. With 102 Colors from My Dreams (2002) (p. 198), he kept a diary of the colors he saw in his dreams, ostensibly a product of his brain, not his eyes or outside stimulus. He matched the col-ors from his memory and his notes as best he could in ink, which he applied to sheets of paper in the form of a Rorschach blot to emphasize the possible psychological origin of the colors. In his large ink drawing Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet Applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) (2004) (p. 197), he ponders the mysteries of synaesthesia—a condition

Fig. 6. Two Examples of Molecular Orbital Theory (Prussian Blue), 2005. Two identical rooms, fluorescent fixtures, and lamps with filters and acrylic paint, dimensions variable. Site-specific project installed at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

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dictionary and Pantone chips in his work, tools that seem to simultaneously expand and contract the color palette, acknowl-edging the multitude while pinning them down with a name.

While Finch is methodically investigating the mysteries of color, it is clear that he is also reveling in its magic. Yet, interest-ingly, it is in fact a black- and- white work that for me perhaps best articulates the allure of color—both its sensory appeal and its puzzles. In the diptych Rainbow (Brooklyn), made in 2001 (fig. 7), Finch photographed the two sites where he determined the arc of a rainbow had begun and ended. Two years earlier, he had spotted the rainbow from the elevated F train in Brooklyn, and calculated where the legs of the arc would have fallen. Of course, two years later, the rainbow was gone. Shot in black- and- white to imply a documentary- like approach, the work articulates both the lingering awe of the natural phenomenon and its transitory nature. Finch captures how fleeting the opti-cal event is, like color, time, memory, life itself. And perhaps because of this, the image of the color spectrum arcing across the sky is wondrous each time we see it. When he exhibits the work, Finch hangs the two photographs at a distance from each other, leaving the viewer to fill in the missing colors. It is per-

haps fitting that each viewer will imagine a different rainbow (just as Albers noted that we will all think of a different red on hearing the word) as in fact no two people see the exact rain-bow on those sunny rainy days that produce them; rainbows appear differently, based on the position of the observer. This work, like many others, approximates the sensory experience for viewers while acknowledging both the limits of what we can share and what we know and what we see. At the same time, it strangely suggests the possibilities. While we may each see a different rainbow, we can find space for it in our mind. As the title of this book reminds us, in the words of Emily Dickin-son, “the brain is wider than the sky.”

Notes1. Spencer Finch in conversation with Susan Cross, August 3, 2015.2. Joseph Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 13.3. Daniel Birnbaum, “1000 Words: Spencer Finch Talks about Collaborating with William Forsythe,” Artforum 43 (Apr. 2005), p. 163.4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors (1810) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), p. 311.5. Spencer Finch in conversation with Susan Cross, October 2, 2015.6. Rolf G. Kuehni, Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), pp. 1–3.

Fig. 7. Rainbow (Brooklyn), 2001. Black- and- white photographs and pencil on paper. Two photographs, each 14¼ x 123⁄8 in. (36.1 x 31.4 cm). One of 2 versions. Private collection

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The extensive plate section in this book—which features 100 works—takes readers on a meandering walk through Spencer Finch’s production from the past two decades. Like his 2013 installation A Walk Through Berlin (with Claudia), which renders a subjective portrait of the city through a collection of colors that caught the artist’s eye during an afternoon stroll, this book presents an alternative path (or paths) for navigating his practice. The order of the works is not chronological; rather, it moves forward and back in time, much like Finch’s work does, bringing together past and present into an animated dialogue. The sequencing of the works creates both visual and conceptual connections and forms groupings that reflect significant themes and subjects running throughout the artist’s practice. Nearly every work, however, could be at home within a different section.

The plates begin with a number of iconic works that convey Finch’s efforts to record the characteristic light of a particular landscape—and to transport that atmosphere elsewhere. These works introduce Finch’s manipulation of multiple mediums—colored glass, fluorescent lamps, theater filters, Fujitrans prints, watercolor, and ink to render various light conditions, from the orange of the Sahara, to the pink of a sunset over Central Park, to the shadow of a passing cloud in Emily Dickinson’s garden. A number of works follow that reveal Finch’s long- time engage-ment with Dickinson’s life and work and her keen observations of the most weighty of subjects through the subtlest of pheno-mena. We then transition from 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year), which James Rondeau addresses in depth in a separate text, to a grouping of works that similarly engage time, function-ing as calendar or clock, marking the passing of minutes, as well as months, years, if not a lifetime. The time- based work West (Sunset in My Motel Room, Monument Valley, January 26, 2007, 5:36–6:06 pm), which Mark Godfrey discusses in his essay, gives a nod to Finch’s engagement with the American West and pre-cedes an unusual view of the Grand Canyon—which Finch made with his eyes mostly closed. This work is one of a series of exper-iments in the mechanics of looking, trying to pinpoint the loca-tion of sight—in the eye, the brain, or the psyche. We then turn to Finch’s investigations into the limits of perception—tracking the artist’s blind spots, the moment when objects appear to lose dimension, or the light level at which color turns to gray. Finch’s experiments in the dark lead into his works engaging the moon—often as a vehicle for portraying the sun. In turn, these

works point us to his representations of atomic structures, outer space, and the sun’s sister stars. This look at Finch’s forays into science includes his take on scientific imaging and false color, as well as his attempts to make visible invisible phenom-ena ranging from a jet stream to the flight paths of birds.

A number of works focus on the studio as laboratory, a site of experimentation and observation and the locus for works that illustrate Finch’s commitment to empirical observation as a window onto the workings of the universe. Equally informa-tive are the works exploring both the frequency and potential of misperceptions—from a lump of concrete mistaken for snow to a butterfly thought to be a falling leaf. A study of cloudlike cherry blossoms floating in a pond ushers in a series of water studies, ranging from Finch’s magical installation on New York’s High Line re- creating the muddy, purplish hues of the Hudson River to a study of the varied depths of Walden Pond. His multiple hom-ages to Thoreau and the writer’s deep knowledge of his environs ends with an image of the famous pond fashioned from a col-lage of Monet reproductions. This bring us to a suite of works that reveal the deep influence Monet has had on Finch’s prac-tice and approach to light and color. A selection of work devoted solely to Finch’s experiments with color and studies of the intersection of color and language and memory naturally come next. The last section looks to the sky and Finch’s ever upturned gaze—focusing on his articulations of the subtle changes in clouds and the mercurial atmosphere that intrigued the likes of influential predecessors Turner and Constable—with materials as simple and unexpected as balloons, tape, and light filters. The last image—an installation of stained glass—provides a mirror image to the very first. We begin with the blue light of a Parisian evening in Paris/Texas and end with the orange glow of CIE 529/418 (Candlelight). Here, Finch filtered down the blazing light of the sun to the color and temperature of the flame of a candle, simultaneously expanding its intimate light to fill an entire room, bathing its expanse in colors reminiscent of a sunset.

Please note that works described in the plate captions as “site- specific” in many cases can be—and have been—adapted for different sites. For sculptures that are part of an edition, informa-tion on the collection is provided for the particular work pictured. For editioned photographs, collections are not listed. When a work is one of multiple versions, each version is considered unique.

EDITOR’S NOTE

ARTWORKS

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Paris/Texas200340 sandblasted panes of colored glassOverall 12 x 28 ft. (3.65 x 8.53 m)Site- specific project installed at Artpace, San Antonio, Texas

On January 8, 2003, Finch measured the color and intensity of evening light in Paris with a colorimeter. Later that year, during an artist residency at Artpace in San Antonio, he installed panes of colored glass on the gallery’s garage doors, to filter the harsh yellow sunlight of Texas and transform it into the bluish glow of a Parisian dusk in winter. The title of the work is borrowed from director Wim Wenders’ film Paris, Texas, which is turn borrows the name of a small town in East Texas.

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Shield of Achilles (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02)201332 fluorescent fixtures, lamps, and filtersDiameter 64 ft. (19.5 m)Collection of Ambassador Kathryn Hall and Mr. Craig Hall

Inspired by the Iliad and intrigued by the idea of seeing what the Greek hero Achilles saw, Finch visited the site of the ancient city of Troy (now in northwestern Turkey) in October 2002. He imagined that the only thing that may have remained unchanged in the 3,000 years since the time of Achilles was the light quality itself. Equipped with a colorimeter for measuring the color and intensity of ambient light, he took multiple readings at dawn— a time of day that figures prominently in Homer’s text. In the Shield of Achilles, he re- created, with carefully calibrated preci-sion, the morning light of Troy using fluorescent lamps filtered with blue, violet, green, and pink theater gels. He arranged the lamps in a radiating circle, referring both to the sun and the leg-endary shield made by the god Hephaestus. Finch’s interest in the shield stems from both Homer’s description and that of poet W. H. Auden, whose own interpretation was inspired by poet Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer. In the text, the shield is described as decorated with images ranging from cities and farms, to violent battles, to the sun, moon, and stars—the vignettes arranged in concentric circles. The iconography has been interpreted as an encapsulation of the entire world. Finch conflates the shield with the sun—the all- encompassing sub-ject of his own artistic pursuits and that of influential predeces-sor J. M. W. Turner, who is said to have declared on his deathbed, “the sun is God.”

UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

Susan Cross

Spencer FinchThe Brain Is Wider Than the Sky

Gebundenes Buch, Leinen mit Schutzumschlag, 240 Seiten,24,0 x 28,5 cm230 farbige AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-5516-0

Prestel

Erscheinungstermin: März 2016