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Vectors Obscura Spring landscape
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29 x 37 |
This isn’t an actual place, or even a representation of an actual window of time, during spring, but an amalgam. Tulips usually manage to appear before a farmer is able to plow the ground and apple blossoms appear a bit later. This painting is sort of like a rock group’s greatest hits album.
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Maple Leaf Rag Autumn landscape
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30 x 36 |
Of the series, The Four Seasons, my autumn season most closely depicts an actual place, but maintains the highest level of abstraction. Autumn is my favorite season. When I lived away from Wisconsin, I missed the autumn season even more than my family or Gus’ pizza.
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Lonely Cloud Wooded, misty landscape with cloud |
25 x 32 |
There is an area in the woods, where the hill holds the trees in its pockets. The roots of the trees, exposed on the path, are like a rib cage, heaving for air through the mist. I live near a place like this in Manitowoc, WI, but the space I occupy in this painting is the abysmal loneliness of unrequited love. I thought of Wordsworth’s poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. I paint the cloud at the precipice of its loneliest time, before cresting the hill. Are the daffodils a celebration of spring or a celebration of lovers able to reconnect?
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Garden Dream Figures dancing in a starlit formal garden
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14 x 33 |
Nick Cave wrote a song, Into My Arms, in which he sings about not wanting to change anything about the woman he loves, but if something could be changed, and if he believed in an interventionist God, the only thing he’d ask, is that God would direct her into his arms. The idea that a gardener can arrange every hedge and ivy, like an interventionist God, got me thinking about getting my love in my arms, in some sort of place, where being together could be arranged as perfectly as a hedgerow.
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Come In Seated woman with doorway in background |
20 x 16 |
The light-filled doorway is for the choices one still considers after living through the resulting good and bad of choices made in the past. A reticent and complacent, mile-ridden soul, may have to sit a spell, but when we let the light come in, things like the past, reticence and complacency fall away.
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Five or More Self-portrait 05
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26 x 24 |
I painted this 2005 self-portrait as a companion piece to the painting, One Life, a portrait of my daughter. She’s brought out every crumb of decency in me. I often say, children are born perfect, don’t fuck them up.
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One Life Artist’s daughter with dragonfly
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20 x 20 |
I painted my daughter heroically, something like how Artemisia Gentilsechi painted Judith. Gentilsechi’s Judith held her hand out, in the same way, but in order to quiet her maidservant, who was holding Holofernes’s severed head in a basket. Young and beguiling Judith killed Holofernes to save her village from his raping and murdering army. My young daughter has saved me from the Holofernes-like destructiveness of life and replaced it with light. I perched a dragonfly on my daughter’s hand, which is lifted and reflecting light as Gentileschi painted Judith’s hand. In Japanese paintings, dragonflies symbolize light and joy; my daughter has added light and joy to my life.
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My Girlfriend is a Cowgirl Woman wearing a Western Hat
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18 x 18 |
She isn’t really, but there are exacting parallels. I look forward to seeing her, when she comes home from work each day. A regular eight-hour workday gets mighty long. My heart, starched from pining, softens upon her return. She and I have our dreams of each other to save us from missing each other in our sleep.
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Dog Man Dog walker
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30 x 36 |
I know a dog walker like this one, who can’t annunciate well and shuffles when he walks dogs. I suppose people mistake his condition as a side effect of taking antipsychotic medication, but his physical impairments are a result of torture. He was a POW in Viet Nam. The dogs don’t need excessive repartee and seem to appreciate the leisurely pace
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Reclining Landscape Heron
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25 x 31 |
The heron, a wading bird, patiently waits for prey, but will always fly to another lake, if the lake has nothing to offer. Even a vigilant being won’t stand around waiting for too long if nothing is going to come of it. Every lake needs a heron, or some sort of fisher and frogger. So, as it is in life. We rely on each other to give us what we need.
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Daytime Galactic Starry lake
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21 x 27 |
This is Hartman Lake in Wisconsin. My intention was to express the starry quality of the sun’s reflection on the lake, the disequilibrium created as the wind blew across the surface of the lake, and the joy I felt just to see the lake.
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Consumption of Eden Statement for the series as a whole
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About ten years ago, I was invited to be a part of a group show in Honolulu. It wasn’t until the show was featured on the evening news that I discovered the show had a theme, Political Statements in Art. I was glad for the exposure and my “political” painting even got some airtime. I asked the gallery director what political statement she thought I was making, since I wasn’t aware that I was making any kind of statement and that’s when I learned I was an environmentalist. I began thinking about our human experience on a planet, shiny and new, when our air, land, and sea still glimmered. There is a story painted throughout the history of art, Expulsion from Eden. Adam and Eve are tossed out of Eden for disobeying God by eating the forbidden fruit. We eat up our chances and ignore warnings. Maybe it’s in our nature to consume our environment and to be undeserving of our paradise. Our species is on the user end of the give and take spectrum. The title, Consumption of Eden, means that we are fortunate for our oceans and land, let’s switch to conservation, because all of our days and the planet’s days are numbered. The ideas for the series presented themselves in a rush. I’m considering broader environmental issues, such as, global warming, overpopulation, deforestation and our dying oceans. Sub-series include paintings of rivers, poaching of endangered species, and conservation efforts.
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Eden- Poaching Sub-series Statement for the sub-series as a whole
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Extinct means there ain’t no mo’ or there is still time. Extinction can be a natural process as a function of evolution; but clearly, there is no function for a species’ demise resulting from poaching. Endangered animals, such as bears, rhino, and tigers are hunted for their parts. Some of our wild animals will only be able to existence in zoos and preserves or like the Moon Bear bred in captivity for gall bile extraction. There are many other animals, which are facing extinction for reasons other than poaching, unless we broaden the definition of poaching to include over-fishing, polluting and ethnic cleansing, or warring of any kind. We compromise our own experience as a species, by destroying our air, land, and oceans. In these paintings, I use Adam and Eve, or a male and female figure, to be representative or the entire human race. Conservation is everybody’s job, regardless of who is doing the trafficking, poaching, “medicine” taking, over-fishing, fish eating, polluting, or warring.
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Afternoon Bile Harvest A & E slaughter a Moon Bear
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29 x 37 |
Some of the Traditional Chinese Medicine uses for bear gall bile include its use for intestinal disease, fever, liver detoxification, burns, weak heart, colic, convulsions, and inflammation. The bile contains ursodeoxycholic acid, but can be synthetically produced, to be more effective and at very little cost. Nevertheless, bears are availed for their bile all across Asia. Bears are kept in small cages, implanted with catheters to let the bile drip, since there is no gall nipple. Trafficking of bear gall bladders and bears occurs even in the U.S. in states like California, Maine, and Wisconsin. Dead bears are occasionally found having had their gall bladders removed.
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No Antidote A & E try rhino horn
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29 x 37 |
Rhino horn is ground down, but is also used whole for carved dagger handles in Yemen. Western misinterpretation of Traditional Chinese Medicine uses the ground rhino horn as an aphrodisiac. There are also instances where Rhino horn, much like the mythical Unicorn horn, has been used as a chalice. Drinking from the horn can be an antidote to poison. Traditional Chinese Medicine promotes the substitution of water buffalo horn. Other conservation efforts have pursued tranquilizing the rhino to remove its horn, with the hope that poachers won’t kill a hornless rhino. Since rhino horn grows back, this is an ongoing task, which is also an expensive and dangerous endeavor.
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Vyaghra is Sanskrit for Tiger A & E with tiger mojo
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29 x 37 |
Tiger parts are trafficked for medicinal and ornamental reasons. Sometimes, tigers are hunted, shot and killed, then butchered. To save on bullets, poachers frequently poison the tigers by luring them with live, poisoned bait, which is tied to a stake and then preyed on by a tiger. Tiger bone soup is served up for joint pain or to mitigate rheumatism. The part paying out the most is the tiger penis, which is removed with its testes intact. The penis is soaked in a brandy or wine, and becomes an elixir to be taken by the spoonful, nightly, for virility.
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Cain Hypothetical demise of A & E
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29 x 37 |
We might as well be eating ourselves, because we have no regard for our own human condition within in a warring society, or one with poverty, or AIDS. Even though we are dependent upon sustaining oceans, they are being plagued by hypoxia and apathy. Our oceans are our planet’s lungs, veins, and womb. The cannibalism in this painting hearkens to the myth of Saturn (Cronus), who consumes his children, so they won’t come back to threaten him. His son Zeus evaded his digestion and did come back to defeat Saturn. Goya painted, Saturn Devouring his Children, in response to the Spanish dictatorship. I have painted Cain eating Eve. Eve bore Cain, as the Earth bore us. Cain is to the human species as Eve is to our environment.
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