The Fountain of Youth Painting

I am a narrative representational painter. I was born and raised in New Jersey though I have lived in New York City for all of my adult life. I am committed to figurative work with ideas, and I always try for a memorable image. I was trained as a figure painter at Cooper Union. An interest in landscape came much later as I tried to make landscape as intense as any figure painting. I usually paint in series: The Four Seasons, Fire, the Iraq war and predators, and Fountains. The current paintings of scenes from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute is my most extensive and concentrated series to date. On the Saatchi site, I will leave work from the 2005 series about the Iraq war and from the 2009 series on fountains. Since 1990 I combined figures and animals in landscapes. In 2005 I used images of war as potent narrative elements. I was haunted by the visuals of Iraq. In a poetic fiction I combined the wolves I'd painted for several years with Apache helicopters. As I painted my reaction to the war, I found that my symbolic metaphor was indeed a reality. I learned that in Alaska helicopters are used in aerial gunning of wolves. Though Apaches helicopters are not used, the image is close enough to conflate war and ruthless extermination of animals. After working with wolves as a primary image for several years, I returned to the human figure. I am always looking for a big subject and I think that I found it: age and aging. In the large painting, I combined the landscape, animals, and figures. The inspiration is a Lucas Cranach Fountain of Youth in Berlin. I look at the past and try to understand what the questions and challenges were. I see if those are things that are relevant now. Then I answer them in my way -- a contemporary way. I may pay homage, but I do not imitate or appropriate. For my Fountain of Youth, I used models, young and old, of both sexes. Cranach has the men carrying only old women to the Fountain. In Cranach's world the men need no improvement, but old women are useless. In my painting both sexes take the plunge.