Our recent American cultural history has a parallel in the Dutch Golden Age and similarly like a Vanitas painting implies an end may be coming. This recent body of work has emerged in the last two years of contemplating loss and consolation; loss of our illusions of justice and a bountiful healthy environment, loss of a stable future. As we bear witness to our failures, missed opportunities, and loss of our natural environment, the longing for a more authentic virtuous world intensifies. Countering these anxieties is the redemptive power of beauty, the consolation of books, letters, the fragrant fruits and flowers of summer, memories of friends around a table at dusk. These images are used here as signs of a reverence for our place in nature and our shared cultural history. Often the table serves as a plain suggesting landscape or a proscenium on which objects interrelate. All these elements interweave various levels of illusion and reality to create a charged dramatic narrative. Into these tableaux, comes a representative from the natural world, a bird, a rabbit or other creature, to observe, to deliver a message, or is it a warning?
These compositions refer to our contemporary environment and aesthetic understanding as well as our continuing cultural history. The juxtapositions are enigmatic just as our lives are sometimes mysterious to us. The paintings speak to all people equally, transcending political identities. At the heart of this body of work is a belief that life affirming universal truths can be found in these created worlds. Beauty in all its tragic and opulent form is our consolation.
