Philippe Sauvie

This work was inspired by Philippe Petite's movie/documentary entitled "Man On Wire." The movie was about his desire to tightrope walk between the unfinished World Trade Center towers in the early 1970s. What he did to collaborate with his friends to accomplish this was an amazing feat. It was the desire to do something that simply needed to be done to fulfill a man's life. I can very much relate to him as a man needing to make the art at all cost at great risk. The image I created was taken from a snapshot of my TV screen and some of the chance scan lines and color changes in the digital photo along with some of my intimate thoughts about his various escapades, including walking between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris but also associating the image with another image that I was familiar with, that being, a 1912 painting by Henri Matisse of Notre Dame Cathedral that appeared to me, a harbinger or prophecy of the 9/11 attack with what appeared to be black smoke emanating from the tower in that painting. Matisse once said an artist is someone who sees the relationship between things. I guess that's what I'm trying to do here maybe not in terms of colors and shapes necessarily between ideas in real life and in art history.