Cabinet designed by Pierre Legrain for Jacques Doucet (Primary Title)
Unknown , early 20th century (Photographer)
My intent is to insert as much information and as many layers into a painting as possible. —Dean Byington
To create his impossible vistas, Byington taught himself to draw in the highly stylized manner of 19th-century wood engraving. He begins by making a collage of drawn and found images. From a scanned image of the collage, he makes silk screens, which he prints on the canvas (Two Harbors incorporates about thirty prints). Finally, he hand paints the interstices to form a seamless whole. Two Harbors offers a loose allegory on nature, culture, and the passage of time. Streams flowing from the harbors—one settled, the other pristine—cascade through mountains, woods, and fragments of world architecture that line a terraced pit whose form derives from an inverted Egyptian stepped pyramid. What at first appears nostalgic and serene becomes, on closer examination, a landscape of ruin and depopulation.
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