...originates from the Greek sarx / flesh and pteryx / fin of which the Lung Fish is one, thus incorporation of the 1954 film, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

...a comic look at actual official government offices designed to explain Unidentified Ariel Phenomena (formerly UFOs) including the UAP Task Force, AATIP, Air Technical Intelligence Center, and National Photographic Interpretation Center within an Edward Hopper Nighthawks framework.

,,,plays with faux pop art imagery, including Elvis as jailhouse dancing G. I. Joe, a  “Banana  (F & S II.10)” drone, Henry Kissinger (modeled after “Marilyn Diptych“) as well as stylized Dr. Strangelove bomb and blow pop to best pop a pop effect.  A stroll down the war hall is a reverent peek into 1970’s pop and, irreverently, 2024-28’s pomposity.

Once upon a time, early in the 21st century, when carnival barking and folks like Elmer Gantrys of the world won political elections, Joe Biden, former President of the United States and only Joe Biden was old.

Bloom's Taxonomy posits that knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, and analysis and synthesis are necessary to properly evaluate new information and experiences. Therefore, enlightenment is a product of accommodation. A plastic brain is a good brain. Yes, all figures are renderings of released Barbie dolls, including the original Ken and Barbie.

An ode to Buster Keaton and bananas.

Triple entndre? Anyone. Bueler. An homage to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, the typical type of Zenith black and white television on which the show was originally viewed. Aside from the zenith of Serling's success, the test pattern demonstrates the point in the sky directly above the viewer as well as the nadir.

The Opik-Oort Cloud, theoretically discovered in 1950, is the shell surrounding the sun, planets, and Kulper Belt.  The earth is represented in the painting as the only very tiny blue dot on the canvas, just left of center.

Lately, my phone feed of various news and articles has somehow AI-ed the afterlife as one of my topics of choice. One chronicled an afterlife experience that convinced the revived that life is but a minuscule place holder, likely only a thought and infinitesimal compared to the stunning transcendence that awaits us at "death." Some of these thoughts within thoughts have included John Wayne Gacey, so if sky's the limit,....

Future soft drink favorites, "landing: in their respective display cases. enjoy an Oh, Gulp, Qi, Zing, Lit, SPRY, Moxy, Oomf, Yum, Yikes, Howl, Ping, Vim, Effr, Rapt, Grok (see Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land), Fizy, Ah, Whew, ! MPH, Gas, Grub, So-D, Pip, Go, Yup, On, Raz, and Zim.

A meanacing rendering of the Grassy Knoll, Dallas, TX (the site of the Kennedy assassination) and the children's nursery rhyme, "Little Miss Muffet." The title can be read as a cur's way or a cursed way and, of course, curds and whey. Dylan's Murder Most Foul or an audio book reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet are recommended for longer viewing.

In Hebrew, yetzer hara (יצר הרע) translates to evil inclination or evil impulse. in addition to other details, I've included the fleeting angel, adapted Shultz's Lucy in her Peanuts advice booth. At the crossroads (see menu item), Lucy's understudy, a rendering of Kay Johnson's character in Cecil B. DeMille's 1930 film Madame Satan. Purchasing this painting would be yetzer halov or of  good inclination. ...tsuris is a companion piece,

Working on the fanciful tale, diving boards from the high-rise windows came to mind, but in the evolutionary scheme of things, the captains of industry haven't yet adapted the buildings to transform the flood into plush swimming palaces.

Look closely, and you'll find the seven deadly sins embedded in "Half Acre" letters, and one other vice from one logismoi or another. A proper tryptic would be Greetings from Hell's Half Acre, coupled with...Armageddon, and ,,,tsuris.

H = Annie; A = ladder, cat; R = sewer cover; D = beggar;

K = boxer; N = banana peel; O = broken mirror; C = horseshoe; K = caught in rain; S = spilt salt (or milk if you'd rather).

“…1951, John Cage in an anechoic chamber, against the silence of the room, two sounds, one high-pitched, the other low, were, respectively, his nervous and circulatory systems at work...resulting in the composition 4’33”, including 30”, 2’23” and 1’40.", ” (Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, p. xvi). Greetings from Notta Sound riffs on a photograph of Cage taken by James Klosty, adding a pole and line as part of the fishing experiment. 

A place most people should avoid as much as possible. Good neighbors and good fences has already been amply covered by Robert Frost. 

Companion pieces are ...Oblivion and ...Far Out, with color not quite as flamboyant as Pollock, Frankenthaler or Basquiat, but embrace chaos as a methodology.

Craving a painting dominated by yellow, I stumbled upon xanthic (from the Greek xanthós) originating from 18th centruy Swiss chemist, Alexander Marcet, and his British wife, Jane, pictured in the painting, and who discovered xanthine or xanthic oxide while studying urinary kidney stones and treatment of "calculous disorders" from the lemon-yellow compound created when treated with nitric acid.  

Typical in the 1600s to 1800s, chases were specifically set aside for hunting, often featuring open clearings and preserved heathland rather than dense forests with boundaries defined by natural features like hills and watercourses, Let's just say that, while wild, that goose more likely cooked than not.

From the American Heritage Dictionary: "The Spanish word juzgar means “to judge,” from which came the Mexican Spanish word juzgado “court, tribunal.” (the j in these words is pronounced like an h in Spanish.) When Americans in the Old West heard the word, they spelled it the way it sounded to them: hoosegow. 

One of two (,,,Far Out) that sort of plays homage to the Coen Brother's film, The Big Labowski.

Mid 20th century actor, Edward Montgomery Clift.(October 17, 1920 – July 23, 1966), an Academy Award nominee, was known for his chiseled looks and method acting (a technique of acting in which an actor aspires to complete emotional identification with a part, based on the system evolved by Konstantin Stanislavsky and brought into prominence in the 1930. Remembered the jaw line, thus the painting,

A jack-in-the-box seemed an appropriate vehicle from which to spring hope, accompanied by a red-faced fanfare, with due respect to Alexander Pope's 1733 An Essay on Man, Epistle I.

The paddle is found on shore, at the upper right. Upa Creek is found at the, companion piece, ...Shitoutaluck, AL headwaters.

This painting was the first produced in the series. the idiom "Catch as catch can," i.e., catch (a hold) anywhere you can, turns into a mythical 1800s playground, Catchascatchcan. 

A painting of planned obsolescence. The only painting that deviates from "Greetings." Introduced by Woodrow Wison on March 19, 1918, DST days appear to be numbered.

An homage to folks who record the box scores on baseball programs and watching sunsets.

...borrows promotional poster’s cartoon figures of Russian and American leaders from the from one of my favorite films, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and adds a third political player to the phone call to stop Slim Pickins from a rodeo ride of doom, updated here with a B-1 bomber. The ominous doomsday clock (as of 9/22/2025, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had set the clock to 89 seconds). Let’s just say the woman in the painting is Kate Pierson.

Bud, a new shoot or sprout springing from the base of a crop plant, especially sugar cane, after cropping.

Look closely, incorporated into the tangle of root the poem Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke: “Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, / Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, / Shoots dangled and drooped, / Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, / Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. / And what a congress of stinks!— . Roots ripe as old bait, / Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, / Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. / Nothing would give up life: / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.”

...borrow from Jeremy Rifkin's Entropy: A New World View (1980) as well as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and a nod to Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey). 1.    Essentially, heat death or inevitable steady state. Definition: a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs. The paint is slathered on this one to gain the appropriate ethereal effect. Among the UAPs in the painting, featured are 1. “Phoenix Lights” observed 3/13/’97 over southwestern skies; 2. newborn Xenomorph hybrid (Alien, 1979, Ridley Scott); 3. Gort the Robot (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951, Robert Wise); 4. “War Machine” (War of the Worlds, 1953, Byron Haskin, adapted from H. G. Wells); and The Blob (The Blob, 1958, Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.); 6. Seed Pod Vines( Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 1956 Don Siegel; 1978 Philp Kaufman); 7. Misc. discs. Companion piece is ... the All-Domain anomaly Resolution Office.

The juxtaposition of a Ford Mustang just passing through and a trojan horse just made a lot of sense.

...incorporates a manipulated Apple-esque logo with menacing teeth, utilizes  HAL’s lens (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer 9000)  from 2001:  A Space Odyssey) and line code imagery similar to that seen in the film The Matrix, and if anything, a Jobs-Musk amalgamation.

...explores Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. During my teaching days, I once had a special opportunity co-teach a hybrid a science/humanities class. I represented the humanities side of the truth. In one lesson, I would have students face forward, then wave a branch over an overhead projector. I would ask what they saw. The answer: “a branch.” But I had to clarfy that they actually saw merely a shadow of a branch, not the real thing (we also read the Henry James short story). Then, I would add, in Plato’s analogy, those who had the courage to venture out of the cave and viewed the actual tree and returned to share with the others cowered in shadows slay the truth teller. One of a few in the series that explore the pursuit of truth and apprehension of the real rather than rejection as a consequence of conjecture and opinion. Who this one's about will never get it. 

(The Daily Planet building is on the corner of Fifth and Concord). I had to refrain from pinning a NFS tag on this one. The bestial arm hangs from a vintage perambulator; closely modeled after the carriage in the film Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1965), implying that Lois and Sup have tied the knot. Many of the “Greetings” also draw from pulp fiction, as does this from Adventures into Darkness magazine (No, 10, 1953),

Like many others in the series, monsters featured. Scouring  the internet for hours for any hint of weird and ominous, most of the monster prototypes are adaptations from medieval sources, similarly the fish in the similar ...Dryas painting, modified as I play with the painting, but the creature in the lower left of the Bend, remains faithful to the original. The Kafkaesque spin off painting, ...Cut Corners, is a complement.

 I once constructed a taxonomy of engagement. As merely a pedestrian consumer, while composing “Zen, Leadership, and Mind on Full” (2019), I discovered anatta and atta. From Wikipedia: “Buddhist term anattā (Pali: 𑀅𑀦𑀢𑁆𑀢𑀸) or anātman (Sanskrit: अनात्मन्) is the doctrine of "no-self" – that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon.[note 1] In some Pali texts, ātman of Vedic texts is also referred to with the term Attan, with the sense of "soul".[8] An alternate use of Attan or Atta is "self, oneself, essence of a person…. Close to the Western idea of ego is the " 'I am' conceit", the root of self-importance and self-centredness. This is seen as a delusion that only the enlightened lack.”  I wondered if I could paint a QR code that would actually work when scanned: Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” & Absurd’s “Son of the Endless Night.”

Two different udders. "Our house is a very very very fine house," with cow calendar on the kitchen wall, and this xmas gift to my wife. NFS. Although you can find other suns in corners of other paintings, or I can send you a canvas print by request.

Colossus is a satirical reinterpretation of Emma Lazarus/s 1883 poem found at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The painting rewrites: “The New Colossus” to the same old: “Not unlike the jolly giant of Green beans, With conquering Floridian and Aspen land grabs, Here with our sea-salt chips on Sunset Blvd. A desperado with a spinning sign, whose flame Is an imprisoned dept, and her name Mother-in-law of Exiles. From her outstretched hand grows world-wide grift; her wild eyes command the global warmed harbor that untouchable pin-thin skyscrapers frame. "Keep sway in our lands, your  storied pomp!" cries she with red lips. "Give me your tired who will work two jobs, your poor, but not too poor, your entitled, few yearning to breathe easy the resplendent perfume of our meming shores, the grand slam breakfast and champagne-toasts to me, I lift my lamps of loans aside the golden door!" Payday loans seem the perfect symbol of the new US torch. 

The only piece that incorporates collage, capitalizes on the 1978 theory by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Patais positing that the high density of objects in Earth’s orbit will result in increasing collisions and cascading debris. The image adapts one of the NASA Orbital Debris Program logos and various orbiting computer parts harvested from a dead Dell desktop.

The conceptual battlefield almost wound up in a completely different direction, but a minimalist approach won. From Merrian-Webster “syzygy • \SIZ-uh-jee\ • noun. :the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies, sch as an eclipse. At first glance, syzygy appears to be a somewhat singular member of the English language but can be traced to the Greek syzygos ("yoked together"), a combination of syn- ("with, together with") and zygon ("yoke"). Zygon is also the source of zygote ("a cell formed by the union of two gametes”) and zygoma, which refers to several bones and processes of the skull, including the zygomatic bone (a.k.a., the cheekbone). Zygon is also related to the Old English geoc—the source of the Modern English yoke —and the Latin jungere, from which the English words join and junction are derived.” Of course, I was appealing to the astronomer audience, but if you’re a darts fan, bull's eye.

Big cow fan, and just randomly discovered the word, the fourth stomach of a ruminant, which receives food from the omasum and passes it to the small intestine. My wife asked if I could paint a cow picture to hang above our annual cow calendar. I liked athe cow flower juxtaposition of ...the Udder Side (NFS), the concept of it, so produced this companion piece.

...simulates a mock autostereogram and capitalizes on Walt Disney’s 1928 short film debut of Micky Mouse, which entered US public domain on January 1, 2024. If you stare blurrily long into it, you'll see Walt Disney frozen in a cryonic chamber under Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

...juxtaposes Katsushika Hokusai’s 1831 woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Sisyphus from Greek mythology/ Albert Camus:  "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

 ...is nearly fully dependent on, or inspired by, pulp images, including but not limited to The Road to Ruin (1928) exploitation movie poster; cover of It Rhymes with Lust (1950) "picture"/proto-graphic novel bover art by penciler Matt Baker and inker Ray Osrin; cover of a Famous Crimes 1, 1948, Fox Features Syndicate; unknown author, all in the public domain.

...or tsores 

Pronounced TSU-riss or TSOOR-iss. In context see Sarah Silverman's Post Mortem. Serious troubles, not minor annoyances, e.g., “Plagues of lice, gnats, flies, locusts, hail, death… now, those were tsuris.” The word is a Yiddish adaptation of the Hebrew plural tsarot; the root tsar means "narrow," and tsarah refers to a "narrow place" or trouble.  Thus, the stylized flame lettering, the plague imagery in each letter: 1. within the letter t, the German "Arbeit macht frei" sign, translated "Work makes you free,” the notorious motto displayed over the entrance gates of several Nazi concentration camps, most famously at Auschwitz; 2. frogs (a nod to Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 film Magnolia, 3. flies/maggots, 4. lice, 5. locust, and 6.  the racially infamous “Jews will not replace us” tiki torches (Charlottesville, VA in August 2017), adorned by a DJT’s  “Thank you for your attention to this matter” approving head peering from the torch flame. This painting is one of my personal favorites in the series. ...Yetzer Hara is a companion piece.

I belive this was the second painting completed in the series; first was ...Catchascatchcan 

A ton of stuff in here including the seven deadly sins are incorporated into the words “half” and “acre." Centuries old influential images: LegauLehenbuehlMaskeH1c.jpg, Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women Met DP-17544-001.jpg; Alcohol, Death, and the Devil) - Geo. Cruikshank LCCN2003674027.jpg;John Singer Sargent - Study for a devil and victim.jpg; Plump to the Devil We Boldly Kick'd Both Nap and His Partner Joe MET DP883890.jpg; Sea-devil.jpg. The shopping around for the images consumed 2 days, the painting was completed in 7 more. Armageddon is a complementary piece in the series.

Alright’s [sic] Reserve is, of course, a copyright protected original painting.

With due respect to the television series of the same name (’79-93), ...Knots Landing was easy pickin's tongue in cheek. I kid you knot, from Winsor to boxers, air speed indictor to tense muscles, the knots have landed.

...has several series complements, any three amke a decent tryptic: Entropy, Chaos, and Tsuris. In a creationist/end of times flourish, I love how the letters spiral into (or out of the center), either like an exploding universe or a collapsing black hole. I worked for days dabbing, stroking, adding, eliminating to gain the proper colors and tone and spacescape. If anything, subliminal nods to Jackson Pollock and Lewis Carroll, as a potential reflection of cautious comfort in spiraling reality.

Thinking of street corners I knew, an allusion to Franz Karka’s Metamorphosis (1915), in which the main character transforms into a cockroach, embodying hopelessness, existential dread, shame, and oppression. If Kafka’s The Trial (1924) or Amerika (1927) fill a void, this painting will certainly fix a thought & constantly remind with a nod to Grete Samsa (the protagonist's aiding then abandoning sister in the novel). See also companion sabotage piece ...Burning Bridges.

Living a modest retirement in a Phoenix suburb surely avoids the myth of Icarus over-reach and toying with the divine. The miniatures in this painting predate my matchbox series.

My favorite landscape in the series. Between Temu, Alibaba, and Amazon there’s no shortage of on-line competition in the early 21st century. But ebay, where else can you find an owner’s manual for a 2014 Mazda 3. Several different ones. And why would anyone want one? They’re not Chilton Auto Repair Manuals or old copies of Life or Mad magazines. From overpriced used shorts to something odd and fishy this way comes. I wanted especially to affect a red tide, and the mixture of the sea’s gradients as well as the hillside are literally a result of thousands of micro dabs. 

This is a tryptic that got a little out of control, a tad irreverent, but somehow, with due respect, "The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?" — Edgar Allan Poe 

from Wikipedia: "Dawn Elberta Wells (October 18, 1938 – December 30, 2020) was an American actress. She is best known for her role as Mary Ann Summers in the sitcom Gilligan's Island" (1964-67).

The figures in this one are modeled from Night of the Living Dead zombie characters (George A. Romero, 1968).