My interest in Dante is related to my greatest passion, Renaissance art. Its complexity of imagery and its humanity is what inspires each painting. The human quest for a perfect world (Paradiso) will always generate its own response in the form of alternatives (purgatory and hell). Within these paintings, all these concepts exist, even though the original intention is a perfect moment.
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The artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti is someone I constantly refer to when I am making a composition. Alberti was a Renaissance polymath. He conceived the idea of paintings as windows on the world. All ‘scene’ pictures come after his theories of perspective in On Painting, published in 1435. His ideas profoundly changed the way artists worked. It is still in print (PenguinClassics); “Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion; instructs the painter on how to use the rules of composition, representation, light and colour to create work that is graceful and pleasing to the eye”. His ideas are challenged by artists but their essence remainstrue to this day.
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A core principle in OnPainting is that the world that you create must be perfect and the rules that govern that world must be consistently adhered to and applied, otherwise the world falls apart. This loops back into the concept of paradise. From the artist’s perspective the technical intention to create it can be at odds with the scene itself.

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