Artist Statement
My current artwork blends allegorical history painting, color theory, and
critical theory into a polemic narrative. These disciplines allow me to develop
ideas of pancapitalism and empire, human rights and injustice, and power and
powerlessness. The sociopolitical paintings utilize both symbol and metaphor and
refer to foreign policy and current events, art history and iconography, color
symbolism and optical illusion for structure and content.
Grounded in the living web of wholeness and balance, my rhythmic artwork
reflects a seamless array of scientific, philosophical, and sociopolitical
themes such as animism, synchronicity, torture, genocide, and corporate
responsibility. My paintings question authoritarian dominance and repressive
power structures, and they seek dissident political alternatives that empower
and engage both the mind and the eye of a spectrum of audiences.
In the past fifteen years, I have presented and installed my paintings in
large-scale panorama triptychs and modular formats. The triptych format
triangulates the narrative and creates an environment of visual dialogue between
content and context. Questions of color gradation and space, language and
pattern, and texture and scale all contribute to the meaning of the work.
Through formal illusions, juxtapositions of luminance, complimentary contrasts,
and saturation shifts, the work reflects our inner detachment with the human
condition. Critically important to me is an emotive reaction within the viewer.
An overarching theme in my allegorical paintings is the quasi meeting ground
where a compassion for wholeness and sociopolitical ideas are simultaneously
considered. By developing several power metaphors, such as the white male
phallus, cowboy hats, and the oil well, I have begun not only to question the
multitude of repressive factors that we face within pancapitalist society, but
also to seek the possible answers necessary for our survival. One objective of
mine is to question traditional artistic distribution methods and to cross
conceptual boundaries, leading to a better understanding of the issues of power
and powerlessness. An artistic and conceptual goal for me is one that opens new
conduits between institutions and communities that have historically been
separate.
In my recent American Commemoratives triptych, repressive leadership is severed
from its ties to the complicit democratic republic. Pancapitalism and its prime
suspect are placed on display in a trio of faces for the oppressed to watch
decay. The head of G. W. Bush is portrayed as Hitler and Medusa, and linked with
Saddam Hussein's pistol. By questioning our subservience to a linear,
hierarchical power regime and the veil of national security by U.S. presidents,
the paintings illuminate our complicity in the self-entitled war on terror, the
cloaked low-intensity genocide, the human rights atrocities, and the deceptive
corporate media system. The severed faces and oil-well imagery, systematically
painted wet-on-dry in polychromatic colors and symmetrically hung within a
Trinity-like scenario, all work to critique the role of dominant patriarchal
power and homogenous authority along with its interlocuting social, sexual, and
psychological subjects.