Artist's Statement:
The eminent British Literary Critic, Northrop Frye, once said “…that contrary to our common belief, art is not about life. Rather, it is about other art.” While he was speaking of literature, I believe this idea embraces the visual arts as well. Most art, and certainly my own work, is an ongoing conversation about other art. Often this means other paintings or sculpture, but frequently, it includes literature in all its forms as well as music. Artists feed on the work of other artists. In the words of Picasso, “Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.”
Originality consists of finding your own artistic voice within the cacophony of voices vying for attention. The idea of originality should, in my opinion, be replaced by authenticity. That is, art should be a genuine reflection of the artists’ inner dialogue with the external act of creating their work. My recent paintings reflect numerous thefts, as well as my own distinctive voice. It represents a conversation with several art movements, most especially, Futurism, Vienna Secession, Spanish Baroque and Pop Art as well as mythological ideas drawn from Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts , Northrop Frye and others.
Muses Series: In these paintings of female figures, I use complex overlapping forms to create movement and abstract shapes; avoiding classical contrapposto and creating a bridge between abstraction and naturalism, the substantial and the ephemeral, the real and the illusory. You will find images of leaping or floating figures taken from photographs of dancers caught in mid leap on trampolines. I use color fields to find the way through the puzzle of intersecting arms, legs, torsos and faces--at times merging forms to become more hidden or mysterious. These paintings pose questions about presence and hiddenness using the interplay of figure and ground and reflecting my ongoing interest in mythology as a conveyor of our aesthetic experience of mystery, beauty and wonder.
My current work in progress, Venus I, is a commentary on one of the most famous paintings of the early Italian Renaissance, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Seeing it again a few years ago in the Uffizi, it reawakened my interest in this iconic image. She is seaborne, as is my fan-shaped, overlapping swimmer, evoking the connection to water as the mysterious ground of our physical and psychic being. Unlike, Botticelli’s Venus, my Venus is of a more ancient origin. The repeated overlapping of her body creates movement and energy mirroring the restlessness of the sea that surrounds her. At once, solid and at the same time fragmented, she is like our vision of the sea itself, a prism reflecting innumerable facets and depths. Right now, she is my muse and I am planning a series of several more Venus paintings.
Social Commentary Works: As an art student growing up in the sixties, I could hardly escape the influence of Pop Art, especially Wesselmann, Rauschenberg and Rosenquist. In this series of socially oriented paintings, POP influences merge with more recent interests in El Greco’s great religious images seen on my recent visit to Toledo, Spain. The Apotheosis of Malvina and the Annunciation of Malvina share some of the drama of El Greco’s themes but add the irony of a Pop Art sensibility.
In the large painting titled, The Iliad, a title borrowed from Homer’s classic poem, a street gang theme is juxtaposed with Day of the Dead images to suggest the violent imagery described by Homer. In his wonderful book, Why Homer Matters, Adam Nicholson describes the connection between Latino street gangs and Homeric heroes, both cultures celebrating in song-like cadences their fallen dead. The floating female in the painting suggests the interplay between sex and violence, love and death and, the presence of gods and goddesses in both traditions—Latin America street gangs and the Iliad.