Creation, 2001. Oil on Linen, 36" x 48"
When the Deepwater Horizon caught fire and spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I was struck by the eerily familiar, terrifyingly beautiful image of apocalyptic towers of black smoke and fire. Having first painted oil fires in 1991 during the Gulf War in Kuwait, I was moved by their dramatic reappearance and fascinated by the strange mirroring effect of the near simultaneous eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano in Iceland. The twin disasters, one natural and one man-made, conjured questions about the enduring power of nature and our control or lack thereof over it.
These paintings manifest a certain post 911 zeitgeist, a jittery mood of fear, awaiting ever more sudden unpredictable explosions and destruction. The litany of disasters keeps coming: oil spill, volcano, earthquake, tsunami, fire, flood, nuclear meltdown, massive tornados, global warming, war after war. But hasn’t the end of the world always been coming soon? Aren’t we a piece of the dark and frightening side of nature?
I am equally influenced by the history of awe inspired landscape painting (the tumultuous storms of Turner, the volcanoes and icebergs of Church, etc.), the stream of violent images in our daily news feed, and a deep direct connection to nature and organic form fed from recent summers painting plein air and my early formative experience of life drawing…it all seems to connect.
My paintings have always explored the poetics of seeing. Using body and nature metaphors to illuminate veiled human experience, I have focused on the meanings of inhabiting body and gesture, shape and structure, place and atmosphere. The structures of nature are the structures of the body, are the structures of emotion. My work articulates these visual connections and investigates the relationships, dichotomies and ambiguities between outside and inside, familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and disturbing, powerful and vulnerable.
Landscape and architectural forms have recurred in my visual vocabulary for many years. Several earlier series of paintings were inspired by different locations I encountered through travel and relocation. These works directly responded to my surroundings as I was consistently drawn to vast melancholy landscapes of sky, desert, and water, and skeletal architectural structures. Attracted to their profound beauty and power, I have long had an interest in environments as materialization of human emotional states.
As personal injuries forever changed my awareness of and relationship to my own body, it became important to image damaged anatomy. A long running theme in my work has been a dual exploration of an anatomical autobiography and a variety of animal images. These paintings investigate the contrasts and ambiguities between movement, flight and freedom on the one hand, and constriction, vulnerability and pain on the other. I use human anatomy and birds, deer and dogs to dramatize interruption of natural movement, focusing on the contrast between an acute sense of immobility and powerlessness and a forceful sense of grace and self-possession.
In the Wizard of Oz series I experimented with a familiar popular text, exploring many layers of meaning imbedded in childhood memory and consciousness. This tale of a risky journey to a wondrous place filled with damaged characters, provided me with metaphor and framework for my continuing concerns. With these paintings I recast the Wizard of Oz as my own meditation on life, synthesizing much of my previous imagery to form a coherent personal narrative.
The Oz series was followed by a continuing investigation of anatomy and nature. This work was initially inspired by the arresting sight of many large trees marooned in a flooded river bank, their limbs reaching up and out, tangled branches spreading like our own bronchial tree, sustained by a root system analogous to veins and arteries. On one level I am examining the essential physicality and anatomy of the heart and lungs; breath and nature; repetitions of patterns and structures in the body and the environment. On another level a metaphor unfolds, speaking of pain, loss and regeneration. Internal organs, keenly felt deep and unseen within the body, serve both literally and figuratively as signals for strong emotions.
In these paintings I continually experiment with scale and the blurring relationship between interior and exterior. Recurring imagery has included water, drowning and nourishing, suggesting the unconscious and the body—reflective on the surface, much hidden beneath, inside. Likewise the intricate architecture of the tree is both another rendering of the human form, down to the most delicate bronchia, and a larger environment, an entire forest. This exploration expanded to include the structures of the inner ear—the cochlea and the semicircular canals for hearing and equilibrium. They’re beautiful and mysteriously abstract with many metaphoric possibilities, these tiny spirals, like so many of my subjects, are a fundamental repeating shape, circling around again and again for re-examination.