"Early Italian Renaissance paintings have always held a fascination for me as images of time and eternity. I am interested in images of birth and renewal. Changing patterns of light and shadow, the rise and fall of the sunflowers are like a representation of the sunrise and sunset. In this sense the painting is not an image of a beginning or end but of eternal and continuous change. The sunset in a sunrise from a different perspective, the end the same as a beginning, without separation. I made the composition dense and complicated, interweaved, knotted, bent into rhythms of composition and symmetrically. The composition reminds me of a painting by Far Angelico, the golden flowers taking the place of the saint’s halos. "
Joseph Black, Winter 2025