Titled: "Lond Road After Dissection"

Works - Oil On Canvas

One of my finer works up to it's completion date. It is intended to be a representation of the incorporation of styles, elements, and all manners of painting into a new artistic language. But only a representation of that in it's barest visceral state. Abstraction exists realistically in a legitimate space within the depth of the canvas. The discordant figure is in harmony with the endless indefinable nature of possibilities within artistic expression folded over itself, yet lost in the maze of what can potentially be considered. The figure is the artist, as with my deconstructed works, in a state of reformation both in regards to the new work and as much in the reformation of the self.

Titled: "Love In Our Valley"

Works - Oil On Canvas Housepaint For T

In creating this image and seeing it to finish, I found myself thinking of what it means to truly mirror and marry the feeling of an image with it's ultimate message. The "Valley of the Shadow of Death" is a small phrase packed with endless emotive possibilities. In looking at past works that refer to the end of the world, or similarly dramatic biblical references (and the dramaticism and humanistic power of the biblical references is the whole of my interest in them), the beautifully composed and naturalistic scenes painted of them throughout history don't resonate with me in a natural way, beautiful as they may be and apt for their time period (such as The Deluge by Francis Danby). Chaos should look like chaos, uncomposed. Hell should look like hell, not fire perse. Death should look as death is, cold and uncompromising, unloving and empty and not embellished or fanciful. Not romanticized. Speaking of romanticism, and the Danby work, this ties together easily. Despite the allure of working in one's own time, being true to an image does not often go hand in hand with devotion to a particular style, era, or movement. Unless the composition and subject matter lie within the small confines of what that movement allows art to be made from. Romance should be romanticized. Romaticizing death only leads to a romantic death or the death of romance. But not to the real flat nature of death. And the same concept goes for other messages and the ways in which they can be visually honored. I attempt to create and form my images from the very stuff their messages are made of, and out aside what I am capable of brushing, what I am comfortable with, what I know and don't know. I seek to join the work where it exists, not tear it down to the places I know. This clearly invites the strong possibility of weakness or failure, and I embrace that as an inevitability no more or less equal to the truth of being human. So be it. In the case of this particular work I found no better way to express what I wanted to say than to attempt to create the most discordant collection of organized surroundings I could, while trying to very lightly hint at the puppetry of it all. It has depth, and seems so local in places. It has color, but no color map. it has form but the only form to be truly understood is the figures front and center and the other figures solely placed in order to help scale the central figures. Everything else is a "may or may not be" purposeful illusionistic mess.

Titled: "Repose In The Scabbard"

Works - Oil Acrylic Rags Mixed Media O

This work developed unexpectedly out of a pile of studio refuse heaped onto a canvas. Organically developed surrealism.

Titled: "The Beauty Is In The Blemish"

Works - Oil On Canvas

Titled: "Theater Of Instrumentation"

Works - Oil On Canvas

This is the most recent work I have completed within the genre of the deconstruction of the canvas. The concept that the body of a work of art (fabric, paint, wood) in a mirrored reflection of the body of the artist.

Titled: "Portrait Of The One Eyed King"

Works - Oil And Mixed Media On Plywood

Oil, House paint, varnish, canvas pieces, texture on plywood, 2010, 24 inches tall by 36 inches wide