The last year has been one of many changes and most have been for the better and have been navigated without too much struggle. And so I am extremely grateful. In September of 2022 my spouse and I returned to live near the town in which we raised our children after twenty-one years perambulating the mid-atlantic, from Wilmington, NC to Staten Island, NY to Savannah, GA. Now we’re back at the hub around which our children’s lives revolve and it makes being family easier.
Our home has a view of the Blue Ridge mountains and is walking distance to most things we need, including a good art supply store. This 7800 person town outside of Charlottesville even has a plant-based restaurant. The terrain feels like home to me.
In January I was juried into the McGuffey Art Center, an institution in Charlottesville, where I used to take my kids for some ‘culture’. In the back of my mind as I’ve been learning to paint is that I’ve wanted to be good enough to be at McGuffey. Now I’m mounting my largest show, Turtles All The Way Down, with my latest pieces and I’m quite, shall we say, stimulated, in anticipation of the opening.
As you know the content of my work is challenging for some people. Its ambiguity and use of the naked human form can make some uncomfortable. Where some see delight, some see danger. But like all art, the pieces are a Rorschach test in which each viewer projects their own interior onto the canvas. What I’ve done is created a complex scrim, like the backdrop on a theater stage that looks completely different from front or back when it's lit.
The use of archetypes provides some universal references, creating a familiar echo of meaning for the viewer. I think of the collection as a group of stories in a forgotten language. The words sound familiar and the gist of the sentences seem to hint at the meaning, but the viewer can’t be sure. I hope that people sit with the paintings for a while and observe what details appear with extended viewing and how that changes the experience of the work. They might notice that the paintings feel different on other days, or when their own internal world has changed.
Some of my playing with the form of the canvas, the edge-matched pieces and the rotating one, are manifestations of my frustrations with the borders imposed by the edges. I try to make infinity the edge on all sides, to break that boundary. In a sense, each painting connects to every other one in the infinite universe. I don’t really want to stop painting at the edge or the end of the day.