1989 THE CHILDREN series

Images that define us, as distant as the memory of childhood. The opposition between transient and the monumental visual representation of temporality. The pessimism of the contemporary.

When I was young, a small human, not yet formed or molded, not yet dominated by adults-philosophy. I was always looking for more pure happiness. And yet from time to time I would meet it, then I would hold it quietly, by the shoulders, so to speak and say, ”Lets stand very still both of us, so I can look you straight in the eyes”. Very simply, this happiness would obey me and stay very peacefully in front of me, around me, inside me. Then just as quietly it would fade away. Disappear without my being. My being able to do anything about it.

When you are very young, you are looking for everything to happen soon, but because it walks so softly, it’s difficult to know when soon arrives. The eyes open from the very bottom of their sockets. They see through everything, but what do they record?

246. WE SWAM IN A POOL OF HOPE

Using barely perceptible images associated with loss and regeneration. The work finds its genesis in German folktales and symbols pared down to the purist.

Inspired by a causionary fairy tale of 1826 about a humble charcoal burner who trades his human heart for money and a heart of stone.

Childhood penetrates even our most adult masks. Not yet shackled by experience encapsulate a watery saclike shape, a uterus, walking away from the viewer, while being joined by her shadow. A reclined fetal nude segues into two diving bodies.

The charge of preadolescent attractions, as a dried creek bed became a sea, the willows were capsized ships, while a fence and a low wall served as effective reposed elements.

Mnemonic traces of opposites collide to yield insights about memory using pink- yellow ocher, reminiscent of the East.

268.GABRICUS AND BEYA

The search here is for childhood’s vanished state of grace, in which every object has the power to touch once’s capacity for surprise, awe and wonder. Diverging takes on the condition of childhood. Quicksilver mood changes, the uncomfortable intersection of children and sexuality. Bodies have been liberated from convention. Comedy is a hook in order to put viewers slightly off kilter. Childhood purity as dukk and and overrated so then they can maybe question other aspects of the piece or the world. Innocence should be conceived as natural, playful curiosity about the body , birth and sex. The work may be cruel funny. Humor is enlivening, even if you’re not sure you should be laughing. Androgynous children preside over their own rebirth. I used scenes not as they actually appeared, but as our memory imagines them years later, stained with the emotion of the moment. Paradox lends a quality of fairy tales and legend to complicate the text. The miniature men that boys transform into superhero could allude to the way art history has traditionally treated “heroic male. The membrane, which comprises the surface of the painting are underscored by the antiqued and distressed surface in trace chains of allusion. I used canvas collage inspired by Lee Krasner’s early and later work. Preoccupation with post-adolescent, a sort of “event-structure ” in a world extended. The female domestic spheres that foster a mothering domain, within which childhood exists, apart. Parochial school dreamland’s, Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

243. ON A BLUE MOON

Derived From Schildburger’s fairy tales of a fantasy village where everything uncomplicated is convoluted and even the smallest deed runs in reverse.

The full moon in the depth of the nightscape aglow and fragile, as a speeding vehicle streaks across the blurred images in the elusive contours of torque shapes, reciprocal movements between fluid line and static form.

The silhoutte has no clear moral frame of reference and thus fosters wonder, rather than thought. Faceless humanoids symbolized in peppermint white bodies with the ashen impassivity of sleepwalkers. Based on drawings from a hospitalized 13 year old after being hit by a car in the spring of 64.

Speaks of the hope and strength that one can derive from surviving a traumatic experience.

Deeply ingrain images in the collective psyche.

A blue moon is a rare occurrence of a second full moon within the same month.

244. ON CHESSBOARD MEADOW

A childhood experience with my mother at the beach, which lead to a dream in which the beach and ocean were a vast desert I had to cross. Painted on quilted wool, punctured with small tears and hollowed openings suggestive of wounds or bodily orifices, parallel the activity of bandaging or sewing.

247. A FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR THE PLANET LEVERRIER

The title refers to a game popular in the 17th century Holland that was played by placing one’s hand behind one’s back. The object of the game is to guess which of the other players has touched one’s hand and at the same time smacked one’s bottom.

250. UNE NYMPHE AMIE D’ENFANCE

(a childhood infamy)

271. MALOUS ORBUS

The silhoutte has no clear moral frame of reference and thus fosters wonder, rather than thought. Invokes the Earth elements and the weathered appearance of works suggest the passage of time, moreover symbols shrouded in complex layering to hint at spiritual concerns.