1990 Parallels and Continuities

Inspired by Harold Bloom’s theory from “A MAP OF MISREADING”

Mapping fulfills a basic human desire to understand the world around us, and our place in it. The language of maps was aerial and celestial views.

This series deals with the relation between geographic contours of a given regions boundaries, and names attached to its cities, lakes and mountains. Maps tend to flatten out geographical features and obscure social and cultural differences.

I realized that maps are the result of perceptions expressed in the conventions of a visual language. The viewer is virtually suspended over a territory above it like an all seeing, disembodied eye.

These works track the physical and psychological journeys of individuals through collective space. I used line image and actual maps to chart physical and metaphysical spaces.

My main desire was to reflect the shifting nature of boundaries –geographical, cultural and psychological experienced by anyone who had left a native land. I saw maps and art as a means of visual communication that give graphic form to abstract concepts, and both extend from the same fundamental human urge to understand and reflect the world around us.

Maps quantify space. Two thirds of the world’s populations live in cities.

This series is about the reciprocal influences that the body and the urban environment exert on one other.

I combine sketched figures over mapped surface in an infinite play of symbiosis and contrast.

Architectural skins articulate an exchange between the struggles involved in discovering oneself.

The facades of buildings whose apertures permit inhabitants to look out and passersby to look in.

Urban scenes in which the spaces, while they maintain there interest associal avenues are used more as channels for estrangement.

Mutilated world maps were used, reading like strange diagrams of an animistic world, a kind of topography of displacement

A tension-ridden spatiality through the sitting of objects along sharp diagonals. Relying heavily on use of cartography in painting and drawings to trigger mental voyages to places far beyond the spectator’s ken.

The paintings are not copies, but paintings of paintings, deconstructing them, taking the disassembled parts for use in emphasizing the independent nature of painting.

Light is a force that makes for sudden concealments and revelations, infusing the urban space with ominous charge.

262. BAUHAUS

The facade of the school, as Cubist geometric into modernist Architecture passing through maps relating abstract form to existing structures, stressing both the abstract codes and the sensory essence.

Works were also inspired by architect Juan de Herrera’s- TREATISE ON CUBIC FORM AND DESIGN and the organic architecture of Louis Sullivan and Antoni Gaudi translated to a surface of pastiche and maps collage,

Salient devices from painting to buildings as metaphors for the rich accretions of human history.

Boundaries disintegrate, into a field of inquiry. The status of maps is an ideologically coded artifacts. Ethereal landscapes, speak of the ability to create a world coming in under the viewer’s psychological radar.

Referenced regeneration within excess, using maps keeps process within bounds as dislocation from the apparent naturalism of the buildings.

I use the metaphysics of mapping into conceptual guideposts. The connotations of place names are significant.

Fractals and architecture of monolithic structures reenergize painting with the concerns of the real world. Architectures are metaphors for a cosmos whose primary attribute is being.

Reconciling modernism rectitude and the fallen reality of the built world, float eerily in and out of the realistically rendered architectural settings. Jugendstil facades gleam in pastel shades of green rose and yellow, the paintings intent is apparitional.

256. RES IPSA

Morphed into wrestling embraces turned into headlocks and back into eyelash-batting flirtation, is a meditation on the Cold War.

The clashing of it with orange and red bespoke heat, power and, not least of all camp.

Done on a round canvas of gessoed Belgium linen.

257. UNMAPPING THE EARTH

22 x 47″ encaustic, sand & gauze on wood.

The crossover between high art and modernist design characterized by Bauhaus-influenced geometric abstraction.

A nonobjective study of the relationship of the figure and surface or ground of work, as a way of conveying meanings.

Patching together a whole out of a damaged, smashed, buried and re-excavated origin.

Symbols of entrapment and emblems of a vitality that the twin threats of co-optation. A memorial to metaphors for imperfect knowledge.

Geometric patterns relate to magical diagrams. At the base are the Asian and European sides of the Bosporus.