“Fairy Tale Remnants” is a series of paintings that reflect on the unsavory side of human interaction. The imagery used is derived from the genre of fables and allegories, portraying psychological dramas where robots, animals, and dinosaurs embodying some aspect of ourselves, battle out impossible scenarios.
The imagery is absorbed from tales of how to survive in a hyper color saturated world of good guys vs. bad guys. These life stories told in the cartoon lexicon. Like a lot of kids born around the time I was, an inordinate amount of time was spent absorbing the violent world of children’s television. Real life desires and conflicts are reimagined on a surreal landscape without its adherence to things like gravity or logic, a nod is given to a dreamlike world driven by the unconscious. Predatory monsters and human beings fight for their interests without the benefit of civility.
These exchanges have become our new normal, raw and brutal.
In the “Memory of Place” paintings, it’s a universe without an up or down nor fixed horizon. The forms that inhabit it are from the lexicon of architecture, gritty surfaces convey building materials.
Walls, roofs, twist, turn, float or hover. Vantage points are skewed. We enter the painting to be thrown to the side. Textures are relatable, colors emotional, but somehow there is no faith in gravity…. This universe may just spit us out. Tilted staircases promise to bring us somewhere. Getting to the top seems possible with the mind’s eye, the body may not make it.
In the “Decomposition” series, the physical medium of the paint is mixed with grit, sand, coffee, twigs. Its very nature seems to be in flux, scratches in the painting’s surface co exists with something as ephemeral as dirt rubble. The raw texture operates simultaneously with shapes that are dissolving as a part of a disintegrating memory.
I want to share visual stories that embody our struggle with the external physical world and our personal and collective histories as human beings.