Taking a leave of absence from my studies at Harvard College in the fall of 1966, I traveled to Mexico, where I settled for a few months in the southern city of Oaxaca.
There I encountered indigenous culture and crafts, poverty and street life, colonial architecture and Zapotec ruins, urban fiestas and rural landscapes. Trying to absorb the intensity of these experiences, I painted with Politec acrylics on paper, developing a mosaic style that grew from the diversity of my environment.
I painted this particular work in Spain in the spring of 1967, sitting in the olive groves on the outskirts of Cordoba, as an abstract summation of my fresh memories of Oaxaca. "MexPnt" implies this process of distillation, with this work deriving from and containing the sum total of my work and experiences in Mexico in that pivotal fall of 1966.
33 years later I purchased a large-format scanner and began to document and transform my paintings from Mexico. I first divided MexPnt into a grid 5 wide and 4 high, creating 20 squares or tiles. Then each of these tiles could become a layer in a single image, with an almost infinite number of transformative variations possible.
Thus, when you click on any of the 20 tiles above, you will see an enlargement that is a transformation in which the smaller tile is but one element. As the tiles and transformations emerged, the stories and characters hidden within the mosaic's complexity also became more apparent.
Full of stories and characters, MexPnt became the seed of a vast series of images entitled Historia del Mundo (HdM), which translates as "The History of the World".