above: my “157 (J)” 2008, (verso)

(above left to right starting at top: Pablo Picasso, Yayoi Kusama, George Ortman, Roy Lichtenstein, Sadie Benning, Ken Weathersby, Catherine Murphy)

For the last seven years I’ve been slowly adding to a collection of images in an album that I call “Art History”.

The photos are variations on “versos”, the backs of artworks, mostly paintings.

It’s a look into the supporting apparatus of art, and what is hidden. Versos show the wooden stretcher, the staples, the raw canvas or linen, the artist’s signature and notations– whatever is back there, not meant to be seen. The artists included range from Renaissance painters to contemporaries, famous and not.

As of right now there are 267 images in the collection.

–Ken Weathersby