Saunders’s ghostly portraits of silver and light were inspired by Hertha Thiele #7, his thinly painted profile of a Weimar-era German silver-screen star. From found photographs of her, Saunders worked backward to paint “negatives” on linen. He experimented by projecting light through the linen onto photographic paper and found the paint alternately refracts or blocks light. He hand-develops each sheet to produce original reproductions he terms "ersatz paintings," like Field Day (Crowd) #4, his imagined film-still with Thiele at center.

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