Painting within a Painting

In late medieval Italy, the father of Renaissance painting, Giotto created a painting called the Stephaneschi Alterpiece where he showed in one of its panels the actual painting within the painting. Within that image was another rendering of the painting. This is one of the earliest examples of what is called the Droste Effect. Basically it is an image shown within itself, like when you point a video camera at a mirror or at the monitor it is connected to. Matisse in his studio themed paintings (especially in works like The Red Studio) created windows into other works within a work. An aesthetic debate among painters, but especially abstract painters, is essentially whether the picture plane is a window or a surface. Jackson Pollack said that his paintings were a surface for gestural marks. There is no denying, however, that when you stand in front of one of Pollack's large canvases, they have a spacial quality. They seem celestial and expansive. On the one hand, a painting as a window embodies 500 years of western painting, while Abstract Expressionism and many non Western traditions explore art as object and art as surface. This is of course an over simplification, but I offer this as a foundation or background to discuss one of my motifs. I often incorporate a window or door that suggests another painting. I do this aesthetically to introduce space to a work that might be more about surface, but also to suggest that I often see works in relation to each other. I generally work on multiple paintings at once, and they develop simultaneously. These works can connect a body of work that has several motifs by showing more than 1 in a single image. I am additionally dipping my toe in the waters of art history and culture. Some of these works, looking forward, also consider macro themes of a multiverse, alternate realities, time portals, and wormholes.