Painting in time

A teaching trip to Italy in 2005 exposed me to the great mural cycles of the Quattrocento and made me question my assumptions about painting and the role of time in painting.  I had studied these fresco cycles in college, but I was unprepared for the scale of the wall-to-wall stories in those chapels: it was like stepping into a giant graphic novel where past. present and future co-exist in the same moment and the viewer can sequence the narrative as they fancy.  I wanted to attempt do the same thing in a contemporary  painting: an ambiguous, non-sequential story with a strong mood.  This required a larger scale and abutting multiple images designed to flow as a whole.  I called these works "painting in time."