Venetian Ghosts #2 | Mark Lindsay
I woke up this morning thinking of Venice. It might be that I need to stop working on images late at night. I'm preparing a new online gallery called, Venetian Ghosts, not something one should fill one's mind with at bedtime.
Truth be told, Venice is a city never far from my mind and always in my heart. It is a city that burns an impression into the psyche like a hot branding iron. One's first sight of the city is never, ever forgotten. We've been to Venice at least a dozen times, starting in 1991 when I studied Italian cooking with the great Marcella Hazan. The city swirls around my consciousness, symbolic of who-knows-what—it has so much overt symbolism it might be most anything and everything.
Venetian Ghosts is an emerging body of work culled from the many photographs I've made there. Since much of my work is about the past and of specters and lost souls, Venice is a perfect stage on which to play. As Venice sinks into a kind of glorious decay, the sculpture and facade carvings of the city have morphed into a symbol of something dark and poignantly sad. The hollow eyes speak of lost glory and forgotten pain. In Venice, the ghosts seem to roam the claustrophobic alleys and descend upon the city like the cold damp fog of its winters.
The gallery will soon be live on the web site, within a couple of days. Stay tuned.
UPDATE! The Venetian Ghosts gallery just went live at 9:00 PM, February 12th.