Over the past decade my work has consistently utilized a figurative tradition to address the widest audience possible.  The work attempts to speak to diverse cultures through its  synthesis of occidental and oriental painting techniques, as well as through its anthropomorphic imagery.  I aim to initiate an inner-family dialogue that encourages social-political questioning at all ages.  My theatrical use of color, scale and medium, and surface employment of whimsical characterization are meant to engage children as well as adults.  Once invited inside the work (sometimes literally) the more ironic and complicated issues of international and domestic concern begin to play. 

 

 

Once Upon A Time But Never Now painted fables  is a series of large-scale distempera paintings on canvas and linen.  In them I employed recognizable figurative imagery to address the widest audience possible.  The scale of these banners allowed ample room for the joy of material investigation.  The playfulness of their animal and human caricatures are indebted to Choju Jimbutsu Giga 's ink paintings of the Heian Period, (12th century) at  Kozan-ji, Kyoto. I sought to reflect the nakedness and simplicity of childhood expression.  Nevertheless they are imbued with bitter, if dreamlike, socio-political observations.

 

An exhibition statement for the exhibition at Washington / Jefferson college follows:[1]

 

News and experience of foreign and domestic social realities, frequently the results of our own action and inaction, haunt the unconscious as well as the conscious mind.  These painted fables, inspired by dreams gestating on the indigestible seek to personalize events that so often feel beyond our immediate concerns.  Our technology portends an increasingly complete, and belies an increasingly biased world view, which our children, as we ourselves, take for granted.  The overload of information and the unasked questions it produces we take with us to sleep.  I hope that these narratives stimulate an inquiry in people of all ages:  Can I sleep with myself tonight?

 

Quotations accompanying the individual paintings follow:

 

 

Tripe [Fig. 21]

1993   Distempera, ink, chalk, rabbit skin glue on canvas

 

Hungry Ducks?

Stab a mosquito

drink blood from the cuts

save the tripe for a treat

or tomorrow’s cold cuts

 

--Ecuadorian peasant's song[2]  

 

All the perfumes of Arabia [Fig. 22]

1994  Distempera, rabbit skin glue on canvas 

 

Out, Damned spot! out, I say!”-- “What, will these hands ne’re be clean?”-- “Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand

--William Shakespeare, Mac Beth (5.1.34-35).

 

Make Up [Fig. 23]

1993   Distempera, human hair, chalk, rabbit skin glue on canvas   

 

We particularly ask you--

When a thing continually occurs--

Not on that account to find it natural

Let nothing be called natural

In an age of bloody confusion

Ordered disorder, planned caprice,

And dehumanized humanity, lest all things

Be held unalterable!”

--Bertolt Brecht[3]

 

What are you holding on for? [Fig. 24]

1993   Distempera, chalk, rabbit skin glue on canvas

 

Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate.  Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire.  There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a Body without Organs under one relation or another.  It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic matter.

--Deleuze & Guattari[4]     

 

Due to the Coup the Buses Won't Be Running

[Fig.25, 26]

1993   Distempera, chalk, rabbit skin glue on linen

Gilded Taiwanese frame, wooden staircase       

 

But if this is a time for stocktaking, it would be wise to note that the enemies of democracy have succeeded in beating down the popular movement.  That is a result, indeed.  The rural poor not only lack access to land, food and water, they are also prevented from organizing their communities in order to improve their lives.  If it is true that one goal of U.S. foreign policy was to render the Haitian poor “politically inert,” then even this cynical gambit may at last be succeeding.

At the time of this writing, however, the majority of Haitians continue to offer obvious resistance to a coup that just won’t take.  But how long can their resistance endure?

In this war of attrition, who will be the first to cry ‘Uncle’?”[5]

 

--Paul Farmer

 

The Birds and The Bees [Fig. 27]

1994  Distempera, rabbit skin glue on canvas

  

And All That Remained Was One Man, One Woman, And One Flower.

--James Thurber