 Title: Green Cupboard Size: 32" x 30" Date: 2001 Medium: Oil on linen |
 Title: Bare Beach Size: 30" x 32" Date: 2001 Medium: Oil on linen |
Such a puzzle my recent work is, even to me. But let me free-associate for a minute: what seems a jumble in an urban landscape moves toward focus when I notice the references to figures, often dismembered figures, parts of torsos, headless bodies, assorted body parts (some sexual) scattered throughout the paintings. Surprisingly, these images of vulnerability and brokenness combine with a playfulness, and even with an old-fashioned sweetness. Domesticity, kitchen scenes, bowls warm with remembered home-made macaroni, tables cluttered with the ancient recipes of Italian family favorites, lace curtains lifting white and sweet in the fragrant breeze, the clean smell of laundry-on-the-line, the loving work of women in the home -- a wave of tender images from my childhood in small-town Peckville, Pennsylvania. And still my loving Irish father, a miner with black lung. Other images include butcher knives, hatchets, and weapons. Not sweet, disturbing. Not tender, threatening. Unpleasant, but real. Not to be denied. Not to be ignored. But then boats, ladders, other ways out, offer transcendence and resolution. The fragility of life in a hard-scrabble, brutal world, and also the triumph of living with, and beyond, this stone-hard, brutal reality. I honor this reality, but I also honor memory and dream and wish and hope as alternative, valid perspectives on what we so simplistically call 'the real.'. I honor intuition, lightness, humor, and love. Life does go on. And life shall go on, triumphantly.