Homage to Mel Bochner
Unfortunately, I discovered Mel Bochner's art fairly late... or perhaps it was discovered at the right time when I was artistically mature enough to understand it. What I found wildly attractive to Bochner’s work was his unique approach to the visual, afterall everything we are, thoughts, feelings, experiences, become an image in our brain from which Bochner takes it out and translates it into a picture worth looking at again and again.
My piece, Homage to Mel Bochner, takes his famous (yet distinctive personal) 1966, Self Portrait and combines it with a classical photograph of his head, where, of course, a lot is lost in translation, but it ties the two portraits into one conventional representation of the artist, along with his delicious bright colors, lights, and shadows. In Bochner's tradition, Homage to Mel Bochner writes his name in relief mimicking both the permanence of an image, and the ephemeral existence of a thought.
