Portrait of Anyone (2009) oil on canvas, 48 x 96 inches.

I painted Portrait of Anyone in Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. On the floor 2 balcony connecting the painting studio and woodshop, I constructed a small room with four walls open to the air above and the building above that. The canvas, 8 feet in width, served as one of the walls of this small room, and the other three walls were mirrors.

I painted what I saw in the mirrors. Behind me, as seen in the mirrors, was the canvas, and each brushstroke made on the canvas to record what was seen in the mirrors at the same time changed what was seen in the mirrors.

I had been thinking along the lines of “The experimenter is part of the experiment; recording the experiment changes the results.” dhm