The images I produce evolve from various confluent interests of consumer culture, art history, and nature. While having been raised on Modernism's entrenched abstraction, Modernism's abstraction is now just part of the language, not a goal in itself. I use two-dimensional imagery of text from favorite songs next to figuration. Modernism disavowed the act of copying nature, criticism naming it the mimetic fallacy. I have found by learning to paint certain plants from observation, such as marijuana, grapes and grape vines, flowers (hydrangea's, cottoneaster, roses) painting becomes a form of cognitive learning about the world.
Generating such botanical images forces me to adapt the brush most economically to rendering parts of the subject, as learning how to use the brush to imitate the seration of a leaf, such as a grape leaves or the saw tooth edging to a sativa strain of weed. (See Copying Nature, Bam Bam, and Drone in the gallery images.) My use of the dildo sex toy affords comical commentary on our culture's phallocentric heteronormativity, a purposeful disavowal of both commodity fetishes and male hegemony.
I often use goldfinches in my paintings as a decorative accent and as a popular cliché found in calendar art. On the other hand, there is a deeper meaning. Research on goldfinches reveals a bird primarily devoted to a diet of seeds, including marijuana seeds. The male most of the year looks the same as the female, almost in a same-sex kind of way, however, in the warm months of northern areas, eating thistle seed stimulates a growth of brilliant yellows, clean white accents, and deep black feathers. The female chooses her mate based upon the brilliance and saturation of his plumage color, purity of color forecasting the health and sickness of the species. The female builds the nest alone, so well woven with grasses that water can puddle, anchoring it to a bush with spider web and thistle down. Being a seed predator, as they say, the goldfinch is protected from the parasitical cowbird egg, deposted much like the cuckoo bird, which when hatched, the cowbird monopolizes the food starving the rest of smaller nestlings. Cowbirds cannot survive on a vegan diet of seeds so, instead, they wind up starving in a goldfinch nest. This scenario becomes for me a sign of the Darwinian winner and loser contests in nature. This differs so much from the Jungian notion of the nest expressed by Gaston Bachelard in Poetics of Space, a book popular in the Sixties and Seventies with artists.
Generating such botanical images forces me to adapt the brush most economically to rendering parts of the subject, as learning how to use the brush to imitate the seration of a leaf, such as a grape leaves or the saw tooth edging to a sativa strain of weed. (See Copying Nature, Bam Bam, and Drone in the gallery images.) My use of the dildo sex toy affords comical commentary on our culture's phallocentric heteronormativity, a purposeful disavowal of both commodity fetishes and male hegemony.
I often use goldfinches in my paintings as a decorative accent and as a popular cliché found in calendar art. On the other hand, there is a deeper meaning. Research on goldfinches reveals a bird primarily devoted to a diet of seeds, including marijuana seeds. The male most of the year looks the same as the female, almost in a same-sex kind of way, however, in the warm months of northern areas, eating thistle seed stimulates a growth of brilliant yellows, clean white accents, and deep black feathers. The female chooses her mate based upon the brilliance and saturation of his plumage color, purity of color forecasting the health and sickness of the species. The female builds the nest alone, so well woven with grasses that water can puddle, anchoring it to a bush with spider web and thistle down. Being a seed predator, as they say, the goldfinch is protected from the parasitical cowbird egg, deposted much like the cuckoo bird, which when hatched, the cowbird monopolizes the food starving the rest of smaller nestlings. Cowbirds cannot survive on a vegan diet of seeds so, instead, they wind up starving in a goldfinch nest. This scenario becomes for me a sign of the Darwinian winner and loser contests in nature. This differs so much from the Jungian notion of the nest expressed by Gaston Bachelard in Poetics of Space, a book popular in the Sixties and Seventies with artists.
