Current Paintings:
SEEKING QUESTIONS TO LIFE'S BIG ANSWERS
When I worked with landscape imagery and the constructed environment in painting years ago I liked to talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation; not to mention a viewer building bridges between disparate ideas. With the paintings today, however, I would say simply that, given how many images we are all bombarded with every day via the media, I am interested in making memorable ones.
The figure has taken center stage but my goal, however, has been to reach beyond fleeting surface idealization and whatever stereotypes we might be tempted to assign men so emblematic of today's obsession with youth and beauty (do we think of aloofness, privilege, a certain power structure?) I get to engage these "usual suspects" on a variety of levels, taking them off certain pedestals of perfection and, through portraiture and metaphor, put them back transformed. Whether I hire them as studio models or they are simply walking down the street, they know that their display is a collaboration of sorts,making them complicit in our viewing of them. Does their subsequent vulnerability empower us at the same time? Can their ultimate defense be their humanity?
Hopefully the work here goes far in terms of metaphor, poking around such timeless ideas as: truth, beauty, faith, time, the infinite, what we learn and what we know. It may seem questionable indeed these days to even concern myself with such unanswerables, but in an era when political and spiritual leaders assert that they in fact have the answers for us all, I think that art has the capacity to imagine otherwise, to offer some transcendent spark to bridge the gap between intent and form, between idea and the evidence of our lives. Muse indeed.
