James Bertucci

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.jamesbertucci.com

City / State: Brooklyn, NY

 I consider my paintings to be landscapes—incessant scenes of urban planning and construction developments in the city’s boroughs. Often the compositions begin with a focus on barriers—chain linked fences, orange plastic mesh, plywood painted Hunter Green—at once marking a site and obstructing access to it. The paintings are composites, sourced from an archive of images and color memory. My working process is a hybrid of direct and indirect painting methods. The compositions arrive circuitously, while paint accretion builds up through extensive layering redolent of printmaking practices. Often, a complex foundation of underpainting is created before the final application of paint, mirroring the process of assembling a building. The resulting surfaces are an index of the painting process and they examine what it means to construct an image.