"The title of this painting, ‘Capriccio, after Epitaph’ conflates the architectural and musical definitions associated with the term "capriccio" and developed as a response to its concurrent 2023 partner-canvas, ‘Epitaph : Studio Threshold : [ B A C H ] ‘—which depicts a singular brick—among others— extant in the interior threshold joining two rooms of my studio, imprinted with the letters of the early 20th C. Bach Brick Co., Chicago.

The ‘blue-line’ painted image of ‘Capriccio, after Epitaph - Capriccio, after Epitaph’ presents conjoined excerpts of bars 37 and 89, from JS Bach The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 Canon per augmentationem in contrario motu, overlaid / set, in upside-down relation to each other. That is exactly what Bach did. In the Canon, he inverted the upper register notes to the lower, and vice versa. In the painting, the block-forms in darker hue designate ‘notes’ of Bach’s name: B, A, C, and H.

As I began, I used a blue transfer chalk in developing the painting. In a certain sense to me, this is a drawing in a painting: a painted drawing. I was interested that the chalk line in blue would reference blueprints as well as the way a chalk line is used in construction. What appears to be a kind of debris of material has been worked with paint... I was excited that there was this debris of construction."

—Julia Fish, 2026