Versus Son Painting

Versus Son is from a group of 2017 paintings that were exhibited in May, 2017 at Artist & Makers 2, Main Gallery, in Rockville, Maryland, USA. The show was entitled anti-land, and very much incorporated dystopian themes that engulfed the United States then and now. My work in the past has been apolitical in nature. In fact, the work has been very insular, the subject matter if anything a dialogue between art and artist. Applications of layers of colors acting as questions and answers, and the following applications reactions to this conversation until a resolution is found within the exchange. In 2017, during the months following the election and leading up to the creation of these works to the show, I found myself unable to extract myself from the communal thought process which was a national epidemic; a torrid feed of a 24 hour news cycle with seemingly infinite resources supplied by the newly elected administration. It seemed every day a new act or a new revelation would cause controversy and division. My own mind seemed engulfed by these reports and the keenly divided arguments they would cause. The selfishness I enjoyed working in a vacuum was no longer available to me. I gave in to the emotive dissonance that disturbed me by the hour and let it become the new dialogue within my paintings. Feelings of betrayal, hopelessness, anger, denial and defiance became my palette, and somehow these yielded some beauty in ugliness, some harmony threatening discord, some hope salvaged from ruin. It is said that writers should 'write what they know', and maybe I have adopted this tact because, at the time, this was I all I knew. I hope in the future to return to the more poetic dialogue I knew with earlier works, that this will not be the all consuming thing that I know; but the thing I remember instead. Versus Son was the first painting completed in the group that would comprise the anti-land exhibition. While I worked on this painting, I had no idea what it would be called. But as soon as I had finished and stepped back from the work, the title immediately came to my mind. Versus Son was more than a narrative for the combative history of the painting, but of opposition of generations, opposition inherited, the son against the father and brother against brother were the common language that was spoken in the North and the South during the Civil War. Now this country may be divided no more greatly than any other time in our history than then. This painting is mounted with D-Rings for hanging. It may be hung on wall hooks or a wire may be drawn between the D-Rings to hang on wall hooks as well.