Project: To create a body of paintings entailing a classic revisitation of Nature with a reconsideration of French Modernism's sources and forms. The Camargo painting project will integrate itself into the ongoing working practice of a New York studio painter by adding the observation of Nature to a regimen of memory, art and reproduction as the painter's primary visual resources. The goal is to create a daily process defined by a perceptive circuit incorporating the direct observation of Nature, the consequent development of a visual vocabulary and a reflection upon the formal and poetic sources of French Modernism. In order to accomplish this, the artist will target vision to sea, sky, landscape, flora, moss and moist soil; study specific, unique and infinitely varied form; introduce painting to new texture, organic enmeshing, atmospheric miasma and tangle of light; and steal forms from their settings and coerce them into paintings.

Insights gained at Camargo will become integrated as elements of a larger visual language within a pre-existing studio process, and will ultimately be exported back to New York to undergo advanced stages of development and synthesis. The ultimate goal is painting in «grand style,» exaggerated and exacerbated overgrown easel painting verging on the mutated and unwieldy. Efforts will be made to summon and evoke the ever-present raw contact with nature to engender fresh form, excessive ornament and overbearing space and scale, sharpened by the lessons of French Modernism, overflowing its own sensible propriety; and to create works that tear into the vines, ravage with brambles and naively leave behind the constraints and decorum of good taste and the consistency of daily aesthetic experience. Aesthetic activity by the sea, navigation uncertain: above and beyond the willed machinery of the artist's creative mechanisms, the Camargo Foundation fellowship promises simple wonder - that age old painter's fuel of filling the lungs and eyes with the fresh air of a new culture.