The Desk In My Studio With My Great-Grandfather Over It

About this print: The artist loves to break art “rules” and this piece is a good example of his challenge to “don’t put the focal point of the composition in the dead center”. The center of interest in this print is the artist’s interpretation of an old photograph of his great-grandfather Edwin Francis Pond, a cabinet maker. Even though the portrait is in the middle of the composition, there is so much more going on in the rest of the composition that the viewer’s eye is constantly pulled in other directions away from the center. 

About the Broome Street Series: In 1966, fresh out of graduate school, the artist moved to his first real working studio in an industrial loft building at 389 Broome Street in New York City. After living on the second floor for a year, he then moved up to the third floor. Make-shift living in an industrial loft space was a new and fascinating experience and his immediate interior environment became the subject matter for much of his artwork during this period. Paintings done in and about his studio environment were shown in his first major New York exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1968. The prints in this series were based on those early paintings and were made by the artist shortly after he moved to his studio at 130 Greene Street.