new work >

In recent years my focus has been on presenting the duality between the natural and the man-made world. I have addressed this subject matter in a number of different ways in a series of recent paintings.

I am currently addressing these issues by showing the conflicted nature of human thought, and our wish to hide certain inconvenient realities from ourselves. To that end I paint a layer of plastic sheeting over my chosen imagery, wrapping the subject in a synthetic glaze. There is a poetic echoing between the way that the plastic mediates (and sometimes even romanticizes) the image it is obscuring and the way that brushstrokes of paint also mediate an image.

The duality I am focusing on is apparent when we use the right side of the brain to respond to the world in a holistic and emotional way, but often in opposition with this view, the left brain goes on to analyze advantages, problems, structural considerations, war, and competition. Part of our mind senses our unity with the world while another part divides us from it. Ultimately, we humans are living uncomfortably with conflict in our minds and my paintings seek to illuminate our thinking about this as I try to reconcile my own right and left brain responses to the world I live in.

In previous work I divided the canvas into two parts, each having different subjects that interlocked in a toothed, explosive pattern. The incongruity of the opposing subjects causes us to think about the connections between them and the difficulty of resolving human desires and long term sustainability. In this new work I am trying to consolidate the various levels of dissent into an undivided image using plastic as a metaphor for the increasing alienation of humanity from the natural world that supports us.