Sunrise Painting

Early on in my career the paintings were comic – satiric works on the foibles and occasional absurdities of humanity - quite funny, engaging social issues in a disarming and comical way. Growing older, it seems I am creating a series of memorials to the overwhelming odds we face. Oddly, I insist on painting them as beautifully as possible. Seeing my series on 5 major hurricanes, a curator remarked: “they’re so pretty.” The content of earlier work addressed effects of pollution and environmental degradation, emphasized by placing multiple canvases in sequential/cinematic order. One painting glows in the dark. Another is a zoetrope of a boy trying to kill a frog. Over 40 years, my stylistic approach to painting has changed from impasted cartoons to expressive realism to "who knows what I should call these"? The content of current work addresses the phenomenon of global warming. To me, paintings are ideas. I take an image and imagine it on a template that resembles the national flag of Greece. Changes are made during its fabrication. The method of painting is precise. With this in mind, here's a sample: I painted a set of clocks of four time zones in the continental United States as a way to paint about the abstract concept of time and devices that keep time. They don’t appear to be clocks - they look like runes, divining a truth without explaining it. Another interesting clock is the Dooms Day Clock invented by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947. The clock is re-set annually to inform the public about threats to the survival and development of humanity from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technology. I painted one in fluorescent red and yellow that does not calibrate a specific time to midnight, which is rather the point when considering an actual doomsday. In a set of 5 paintings, an image of the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island is visible. Each painting is named after one of the more severe, recent cyclones/hurricanes in the USA: Katrina, Sandy, Irma, Harvey, and Maria. To me, weather has become a roller coaster of extreme events - less predictable, more severe. In a recent set of 4 paintings titled Snow, an image of Mount Denali is painted. Half the snow is yellow, half the snow is white. As a child, my friends would say: “Don’t eat yellow snow it’s been pissed on”. Current works extend this theme, painting a television test pattern with instructions to 'Please Stand By'.