Post Card Collection

I became interested in paintings of the Annunciation during the early 1990s when our family lived in Switzerland for two years. When my parents came to visit, we took them to see the Thyssen Bornemisza art collection in Lugano, Switzerland. That collection is now in Madrid, Spain. I especially enjoyed looking at many beautiful paintings with my mother. I remember that we stopped for a long while, enjoying the Annunciation painted by the Italian artist, Benedetto Bonfigli. Before leaving, I made sure we stopped at the gift shop where I purchased a post card of “our annunciation painting”. Since that day. whenever I visit museums or other collections of paintings, I look for post cards of Annunciation paintings.

As friends and family have learned about the post card collection, they have sent me post card images of Annunciation paintings from their travels as well. I have known I wanted to make a work of art about this subject for some time. In my earliest ideas, I envisioned the work to be made up of the actual post cards. But though I played with the post cards often, sorting and arranging them in different ways. etc., I never came up with a satisfactory idea for making art with the post cards that I liked.