sanda iliescu

This project began with a wall that had been painted bright yellow for a temporary exhibit at the UVA School of Architecture in the fall of 2011. The building’s manager planned to repaint the wall white. Students in my painting studio and I volunteered to do this repainting, but also to extend the process over fifteen days. We began by adding a series of “blue notes” made of blue painter’s tape that had variable heights (determined by the students’ heights) and different inclinations (determined by throws of a die). We returned the wall to its original white very gradually, over a ten-day period. Early in the morning of each day, we added a transparent layer of white paint. We applied these daily layers with cotton rags dipped in a mixture of water and house paint, by gently tapping the wall in repeated, circular motions. We called this method “our Boom-Boom technique” because of the sounds of our tapping motions. Kevin McVey, a student in the class, created a musical composition based on recordings of these tapping sounds.

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