concept

A concept or theme for a body of work does not present itself spontaneously. It evolves over time and is a culmination of past work and experience. "Second Genesis" has been with me for a very long time.

Mixing myth and reality was a major part of some of my earliest work. A large painting “Prometheus” completed in 1981, combined elements of Norse and Anglo Saxon mythology with science and religion. In this painting a DNA molecule ties numerous smaller vignettes together into a single larger composition. Prometheus in the foreground holds a modern form of forbidden fire, the atom.

Prometheus

Oil on canvas, 72 X 48 Inches, 1981

Dark Age figures ascend from the underworld on an eternal stairway that rises progressively into the heavens above while a self portrait image of me as an Anglican Acolyte carrying a crucifix dominates the middle ground. At the very top of the composition, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse charge into a mixed world of scientific reality and myth. In the lower left corner, Satan, accompanied by a cadre of demons, looks over his shoulder with an accusatory gaze.

In this age of information overload, we are surrounded by images and messages that work their way into our subconscious mind and eventually our dreams. We are constantly bombarded with political, environmental and religious propaganda in the media, all of which unavoidably leave an impression.

Add to this mental stew, our own life experiences, like the toys we had as children, family life, school, travel and military service, the material for artistic expression becomes almost endless.

I was born in the early years of Word War II and grew up during the Korean War and the War in Vietnam. I How can I ignore the fact that I lived in Dwight Eisenhower’s age of the Great Industrial Military Complex? I was part of it. I was also part of the flower generation and the peace movement and I sided with the Great Society during the civil rights movement.

I consider myself fortunate to have been able to attend schools that were still tied to a classical education. While I did not always appreciate it at the time, my struggle with Latin, classical history and mythology has greatly enriched my life. When the Russians sent Sputnik into orbit around the earth, the educational establishment was shocked into putting greater emphasis on science and math. I then became part of the national enhanced sciences education program. The classics took a back seat to what was an international competition and technical revolution.

I have always been fascinated by technology. Professionally, I became an engineer who played a small roll in the first Apollo landing on the moon. Later, I took part in the development of the F16 fighter aircraft and during the Y2K crises of 1999-2000, I led a team of engineers in upgrading thousands of government computers. I still have a passion for machines; however, I have learned that they require constant attention and maintenance. I have also become fully aware that too often, technology fails.

Take my fascination or perhaps obsession with tricycles. It began when I got one for my birthday in 1947. It was a marvelous piece of machinery; bright red, made from hard steel with chrome wheels and wire spokes. This was real nuts and bolts stuff and what has evolved into today’s plastic modern equivalent is in no way comparable. For a curious and adventurous post war five-year-old, this was more than just a toy. t was an extension to life and a first real means to go outside to freely explore a whole new world beyond the often stifling safety of home.

My Tricycle 1947

Sixty years later, while thinking about my seemingly endless hours riding around a city block, dark and cynical elements began to invade what were once innocent recollections. The painting, “Tricycle,” 2008, combines modern fears and themes from over protectionism to unfortunate political, social and ecological realities with my old toy. While somewhat humorous, the resulting painting very much unlike another of my tricycle paintings the "Aeronaut," was a sad and scary image of a boy wearing a hazmat suit riding a traditional tricycle in an obscure and undefined space.

Tricycle

Oil on canvas, 22 X 28 inches., 2008

Aeronaut

Oil on canvas, 40 X30 Inches, 2008

I am also forced from time to time, to face up to the naked truth or at least the truth about human nakedness. For most of this country’s history, men and boys swam naked. I swam naked along with many others as a boy. Men’s clubs and the YMCA continued the practice well up into the 1960s when the women’s rights movement forced coed memberships. Still most boys continued to swim in local swimming holes and play on river banks and sandbars nude. Whenever they were discovered, there was little nterest in faking modesty. Even for parents, it was at worst, an inside joke worth a good laugh. School children, at least the boys, lined up in the gym naked for the annual ritual of a doctor’s physical. Boys changed clothes in un-partitioned locker rooms and bathed in gang showers. I cannot personally remember anyone back then, child or adult, ever having a problem with it. Now after the sexual revolution, the establishment of laws ending gender discrimination, liberalization of sexual preference and continual sensationalized media exposure of child abuse, everything has changed. Nudity now strikes terror in most peoples' mind, and today nude images carrying the excess baggage of a paranoid and hyper sexualized society, especially those of children which were once very common, even in mainstream newspapers and magazines, are gone. So are most literal illustrations of totally fictional characters like Mowgli and Tarzan.

While huge international corporations enslave the world to what often seems senseless and wasteful materialism, political and religious conservatives along with liberal protectionists, are ripping everything that makes us human from society and when it comes to art, nothing seems to draw their crusading wrath more than the image of a naked human being. Still I remain steadfast in the belief that we all are unique individuals and even the least of us has something to contribute in making this a better world. We are also physical creatures, young and old, with bodies which according to Judao-Christian tradition, were created in the image of God. Nakedness, therefore, is sacred and should be thought of without the shame and guilt often associated with it. We are all human beings deserving of respect and dignity, even when naked.

Three Graces

Oil on canvas, 22 X 28 Inches, 2008

"Three Graces" painted in 2008, attempts to capture the imagery of a decaying civilization. A materialistic world laying in ruin with mannequins, similar to classical sculptures of the three graces ( goddesses of joy, charm, and beauty) stand in an abandoned department store's broken display window. All is lost and in a state of decay with what must be the last surviving tricycle being ridden on a road to nowhere by a vanishing image of a nude child.

Apocalyptic visions and prophesies of coming last days have been around since the beginning of history but it was not until the invention of the atomic bomb during the Second World War and the succeeding Cold War in the 1950's and 1960's, that total annihilation of the human species and the planet by a war of mutual destruction, became a universally accepted possibility. The Cold War has since subsided to a degree but a new vision of human induced global warming and climate change has taken its place. Instead of being instantly fried by a thermal nuclear blast or freezing to death with the onset of nuclear winter which would follow, we are now told that humans face the possibility of a much slower means of extinction.

Urban Aboriginals

Oil om canvas, 40 X 30 Inches, 2008

For whatever reasons, whether man made or natural, are driving global warming, as the planet warms, glaciers and polar ice caps will melt. Oceans will rise. Coastal cities and agricultural lowlands will flood and millions of people will be displaced. As weather patterns shift, storms intensify and the land alternates between unseasonable rain and drought. Rivers erode, change course, and dry up. When fresh water becomes a scarce or nonexistent commodity, even more people will be displaced. The great plains of America, Europe and Africa will turn to desert and without sustainable agriculture, large populations will no longer be able to feed themselves. Mass migrations of displaced people competing for diminishing resources can only breed war and insurrection. Governments will be overwhelmed and fail; technologies and the infrastructures they support will collapse.

Putting all of this together I was faced with one last dilemma. How can I create meaningful representational narrative art? People are generally bored with history, indifferent to the present and afraid of the future. How then do I get anyone to pay attention to just one more apocalyptic rant? My answer was to pour everything into one paint pot and stir it all up. Time and place were intentionally made to be irrelevant. Human figures, animals and familiar objects were used throughout the narrative to capture the mind's eye and evoke emotional responses in a play on past, present and future without being specific.

Nothing is meant to be real but everything is based in part on some reality. Nothing points to any one truth yet everything is tied to some underlying perception of truth. I raise questions, present conflicts and challenge conventions.

"Second Genesis" is my invitation for the eye to explore and perhaps find something relative which might register in a viewer’s conscious or subconscious mind. If nothing more, I hope the paintings are found by most to be, at least, interesting.