49. TOUCH HEAVEN WITH ITS CONCAVE MEADOW OF SKY

1973 Burgundian Season Cycle

Strengthening the bond between surface and image through the combining results of a birds eye view, I use the word cycle to mean a circular mythology. I combine elements of Oedipal journey with Nietzschean notions of eternal return. A critique of the Western objectification of the self reflects the challenge to modern esthetics and rationalism posed by Heidegger. The landscape is marked by indiviual and collective aspirations projected on it; becoming a staging ground for tales that reference vulnerability, or what persists in collective memory. The tenuousness between a sign and its meaning. I took definitive moments in intimacy and privacy, eliciting a sense of identification from the viewer. A self that is gestational and seasonal, interior and shell, prison and temple.

Malcolm de Chazal “If there were no light, nothing would exist; hence everything is sex.“ Woman’s sexuality is responsible for man’s mortality. The Germanic root of the word “lust” signifies “religious joy”, a metaphor for many things. The expression of desire invests textually as an alternate world parallel to primary experience. By downplaying the sensuous expressive qualities of the paintings surface focuses on allegorical commentaries on life, love and the human condition. It is composed of sections that lap over each other like slowly separating petals.

56. DURATION

I show a spent light bulb exposed by a candle, the shadowed wraith of the bulbs contour and filament. Numbers are on the floor as though they have fallen from the clocks face, scattered like rice at a wedding. Duration is a reference to our nature, ruled by our internal clock, an eternal condition.

62. BEARING HIM THROUGH THE AIR LIKE A DREAM

(Paris) 32 x 41” oil & watercolor on gessoed rag

Based on Klaus Thewelheit’s study of the men of the German Freikorps after W.W. I. Men who made their bodies of a kind to eradicate anything that might be deemed feminine within them.