1983 The Air of Obviousness, Thins

Fleeing the commercial urban centers for the rural, I sought a more direct, authentic expression and a greater unity with nature. I reveal a murky ambivalence to these polarities of city and country as they carried their modern influences to their remote retreats stimulating an unrefined quotidian life, the chaotic potential of nature and its threat of death. Appalachia’s impoverished hill folk; document some of America’s last socially permissible scapegoats. The popular demonization of poor white people (as the bomb makers, the bigots, the dangerous pious.) The country is being viewed with city eyes and a city vocabulary. I created a unity with nature by echoing the curves of the women’s bodies in those of the tree and the russet earth. House images become ciphers of the soul, as the timeless need for shelter with an awareness of contemporary distractions. Urban life is dense with the drama of chance collisions. The legs of the figures are left sketchy to convey the perpetual movement and instability of the figures.

174.

The Wind in the Straw Gone Awry

48x72″ oil on polypropylene

The works add a reflective dimention to as desolate area. Palettes shapes invoke the Zen concept of yin and yang. Time was the engine of gradual transformation, leading to the en tropic state. Forces of immediacy are set against tranquil scenes, the inner gaiety and strength of lives consecrated to a non-material end. Snared gesture beat, like the erratic lifeline of a now-stilled tradition.

176. EYEBRID

No figures populate these scenes, but cumulative traces of human presence are everywhere. Nothing moves yet everything has been caught at a moment of transition, defining the struggle to remain a family. Based on Steinbeck, and Greenberg, who skillfully smuggle 1930’s, Marxism and Trotskyism into art theory as Brechtian critiques of capitalism. The ubiquitous marketing impulse transforming culture. All these locations look strangely alike and share a certain atmosphere. The elimination of color has an abstracting effect that takes further with concentration on large masses and on distant points that pull ones eye. One sees the land not in terms of vegetative pleasantries put in sharp contours and abrupt displacements.

194. Incursions Champatres

At the time I was into an egoless imersion outside the contemporary main stream. The Charolais cattle that graze in the fields of Burgundy. My goal was perception of how their bodies reflect the changing light, perceptions then magnified and condensed.The light slanting across meadows is made of thick and creamy paint. The cattle materialize from pigment , their heads lowered and self contained. They serve as symbols of women’s submissive enchainment to nature’s round of breeding and nurturing in contrast to the higher male world of culture. (Masculine transcendence and feminine immanence sensual solid and present.)

187. BOVINE

Sun-struck a red-dappled cows pauses in a brief moment of sentient eternity and diminutive, yellow sky. The passive animal beauty seen in a deep scarlet twilight, nearly lost.