Song of Songs 2009 - 2010

I am painting my version of the Song of Solomon (also called The Song of Songs) from the Bible. The most erotic and beautiful part of the Bible, the Song of Solomon is a controversial love poem that has been interpreted in a variety of ways. These paintings are my personal interpretation, which is queer: the series will be a love song to my wife and son. There will be forty pieces in the series.

The first six paintings correspond with the first part of the Song of Solomon and represent courtship and frenzied new love. They are based on photographs I took while my wife and I were hiking through the vineyards of Italy's northwestern coast. It was an idyllic, romantic environment that mirrored the state of our new relationship.

The next five paintings correspond with the part of the Song of Solomon where the narrator experiences a kind of existential anxiety about possible threats to her new love, while still reveling in its comforts. I continued using photographs from our trip to Italy for source material, but included more abstract imagery that represents our young marriage and our trying to get pregnant.

As abstract, landscape-based paintings, I expect that these will communicate differently to different people (as is the case with most of my work). Drawn from the Song of Solomon, (with some of the gendered pronouns changed) the titles are meant to help a viewer connect the painting with its meaning. By not providing a literal translation of the visual elements, I have relinquished some control over what is read into the paintings. Ultimately, the person viewing a painting deciphers it within his/her own frame of reference, and is invited to enable the very act of looking to generate the meaning.

^

If The World Should End In Fire (Just Remember Red, Red Robin) 2008
This was the only painting I did during my difficult pregnancy. A volcano in disguise (made of peaceable sands) is at the center, along with a wheel of symbols. On the wheel’s left half, the symbols are all various representations [according to Me, or various mythologies and traditions around the world throughout time] of Warning: tidal wave, fire, arrowheads, leafless tree, rope, the Hindu hand gesture signifying Warning. On the right are representations of Blessing: wood, a snake, bow and arrow, breastie shapes, blossoming tree, the Hindu hand gesture that signifies the granting of a blessing by the God present. On the left panel of the triptych is a housebound plant weathering winter. On the right is a winter sunrise with leafless poplars. I, and my baby, almost died in childbirth. But we didn’t; we are both healthy. I think of Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me, and of the way she painted her pregnancy that ended in tragedy.

^

Waltzing Me All The Way Home 2007
The basis for this body of drawings is my romantic notion of Paris, held since I was about seven years old. I mean for it to be a kind of love song both to Paris and to all such childhood infatuations that carry into tempered adult longings. Chunky colored light bends around piles of faint bricks while wispy threads stroke pipes on fire coming out of the Eiffel Tower.

The title Waltzing Me All The Way Home is borrowed from (or, respectfully stolen from) the song of the same title by Stephin Merritt. Odetta, who sings Merritt’s song, told Merritt that she imagined the song was about two black, gay soldiers in World War II. While this is not the meaning Merritt intended, her interpretation rests profound and quiet, like the song itself. I find some metaphorical truth in her interpretation; as though I, as an American, and Paris are impossible lovers in an impossible world. The song encapsulates a sense of pleasant gratitude as well as sadness and acceptance.

You were a soldier from the war,
waltzing me all the way home
I'd never seen your kind before,
your every word was a poem
Thank you for giving me reasons for living,
more reasons than I'd ever known
Thank you for giving me new worlds to live in
and waltzing me all the way home

Now that you're just a memory,
waltzing me all the way home
I hope they treat you tenderly in London, Paris and Rome
You'll find a lover who looks like your mother,
For heaven's sake don't be alone
And I'll find another lover who looks like your brother,
But never another for waltzing me all the way home

^

Mary Parade 2006
This series of paintings is my attempt to re-experience an event I witnessed in Costa Rica while on my honeymoon in 2004. It was too good to be real. I was sitting on the beach when I looked up and saw a red pickup truck with speakers and people piled in it with latin music coming out. Behind the truck there were local people from the town in their Sunday Best walking in a procession. Little girls in white dresses were being towed in carts carried by bulls with flowers around their horns. And in the middle there was a large, chipped and cherished plaster statue of Mary in a cart overflowing with greenery pulled by blonde cows. In the paintings, the red pickup truck is filled with breasties squirting milk, and Mary is a giant cake with yellow frosting.

^

In Place 2006 - 2008
I do these abstract landscape paintings as a way of experiencing the place I'm in. Most often they are painted outside.

The Ireland series was painted outside on the west coast of Ireland in County Mayo.

I painted the Southeast series outside on friends' porches in North Carolina and Georgia, and on the beach in South Carolina. We made this trip during "Red State"vs. "Blue State" political angst, and I did these paintings as a way to cope with, and appreciate, the South.

The Washington series was based on photographs I took one evening in rural Washington.

^

Berlin Paintings and Drawings 2005
I lived in Berlin for four months in 2005 as an Artist-In-Residence at the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft. The work I produced that Summer in that gloriously HUGE studio features big and broad the river Spree and yellow fields seen in rural Germany. Misplaced tram tracks and hot pink graffiti meet as postindustrial orphans in a heavy white space. Poplar trees shake their leaves in warm wind and abandoned yellow brick buildings maintain a stoic stance.

^

Dublin Paintings and Drawings 2005
For four months in 2005, I had the amazing experience of living at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as an Artist-In-Residence. A former Veteran's Hospital from the 1800's, the white stone, castle-like museum building became a primary character in the work I did there. Winter grays, greens and blues soften crumbling bricks, tongues (wanting to eat everything up), homemade industrial pipes with fire coming out, and squirting breasts heralding Spring.

^

Statement Drawings 2005
Quite different from anything else I've done are the "Statement" drawings, with which I am seeking to make a sincere statement using a visual language. These drawings have as their centerpiece various hand gestures that in Hindu traditions signify something particular when a god or goddess takes that pose. One gesture signifies that the god is granting a blessing, another issues a warning. Because many coming to view these drawings might not know the meaning of these gestures I have made the titles as specific as possible to reveal information I have regarding them. These drawings are particularly political and personal, as I attempt to use them as sentences composed with images rather than words; which is why their compositions are somewhat sentence-like. A warning gesture is buffered symmetrically by tidal waves; bandaids lace the border. Not all of the marks within these "sentences" are translatable into text, and so the viewer must rely on their own understanding of a purely visual vocabulary in order to interpret meaning.

^