Curriculum Vitae I-V

Curriculum Vitae II
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Curriculum Vitae III
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Curriculum Vitae IV
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Curriculum Vitae V
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

The whole series of Curriculum Vitae paintings can be seen at the Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi collection, Palazzo Butera, Palermo

 This text and those on the other CV pages which follow are adapted from Work and Texts (1992),  pp. 24-35.

Most children like sets of things. The stamp and cigarette-card collecting, however, usually become transmuted in adulthood into filing systems and golf clubs. My particular love of amassing sets of things has turned into the making of them. Time and again I have painted a picture only to find the call for another to provide a pair, and to yield then to the irresistible urge to add another and another.

Thus a set of pictures certainly seemed apt as a format for dealing with childhood. If their scale is larger than that of the matchbox top or those other first collected things, might this be a way of saying that childhood's little epiphanies were in fact great revelations?

As I sieved my past I found that the seeds of all that obsesses and concerns me in my art and life were all sown much earlier than I had guessed. The couplet which ends CV III and sums up the reveries engendered by a damp spreading mark upon the bedroom wall of my infancy, states the theme clearly,

Implicit in that stain right from the start
was all I've since invented and called Art.