Sounding the Small Lament Painting

1948Boulder, Colorado USA In my paintings and drawings I'm working on the mysteries bound up in human beingness. With reflections that blur boundaries between real and psychic realms, as in dreams, I take images from both and position them in improbable situations meant to remove one from the personal self for explorations of soul. The whole of my work is concerned with the duality of human existence, the internal contradictions we live with, as in the necessity to follow social rules, yet have fierce desires to be individuals outside of those rules. In portraits I like to unravel the oddities of individual identities, the ways we are different, through the fantasies, dreams, and obsessions that fuel my subjects' inexplicable fires of existence. The inspiration for Shadowed Time and Martin came from the sitter's dream, where he found himself in a cattle car surrounded by photographs of his distant relatives who had experienced the holocaust. I position him in my painting as their intervening angel. The more archetypal work involves issues of body and cloth, as related to death rituals. Practices of wrapping the dead in cloth for purity and equality signify our dual nature that sees death as the ultimate unifier, no matter the lifetime singular experience. In Messengers the figures, held in the deepness of personal selfhoods, are peering out at the viewer through uniformly white wrappings, barely particularized through the veils that represent the entirety of humanity.