MIGRATIONS
The painting series entitled "Migration," conveys a limbo where nature is at odds with defunct industry. Birds and other animals continue to survive--apathetic to the bleak human imprint that marks their surroundings. Society is altogether absent in the compositions, while ruined factories and machines wither in remembrance. The animals themselves demonstrate human qualities as they quarrel or reflect in a reclaimed kingdom.
CHEAP ALLEGORIES
The Cheap Allegories is a series of paintings, drawings and installations based on ten masks sculpted from paper mache´, synthetic fibers, animal pelts, wood, plastic, latex and other materials. Starting with just a head, the mask itself, a character is eventually developed and given attributes through, drawing, painting and the construction of a life-sized figure.
Informed by horror films, taxidermy, and classic portraiture, the Cheap Allegories series intends to give life to fantastical creatures that materialize in thoughts and dreams. Rather than painting from imagination or memory, this series depends on the mask-- a three-dimensional embodiment of the fantasy, as a model for rendering a natural likeness. Each mask is mounted on a life-sized mannequin which is then clothed like a doll, positioned and surrounded by objects to suggest a narrative. This approach to painting the figure borrows from the classical tradition of the artist observing and attempting to capture the specific qualities and features of the individual who is posing. By contrast, however, the lifeless models depicted in the Cheap Allegories are static forms that appear stiff and restrained.
PERISHABLES
The Perishables series is comprised of 35 gouache and watercolor paintings that attempt to capture animals' life essence in various post-mortem expressions. The subjects were found in Chinatown markets, natural history museums, or caught in traps. This body of work investigates the urge to memorialize and applies it to the undomesticated animals that have been captured or killed.
Each figure's treatment in the series is determined by the circumstances of its death. Some studies explore the strange results achieved by taxidermy: attempts to re-create noble or ferocious qualities often produce a blank, even comical expression. The images of mice testify to the violent struggle preceding death in a trap. The trap not only preserves the final, unnatural contortions of its victim, it also allows the normally furtive victim to be studied at length and close up. The animals from Chinatown markets are portrayed intact, before their transformation into something edible. In such a state, carcasses force the viewer to confront the physical features humankind shares with the animals it eats.
In depicting the mundane details of an animal's form, Perishables attempts to distinguish its subjects and recoginize the common attributes of human and animal mortality.
LANDSCAPES
All landscape drawings were drawn in situ. The Spain drawings were made during three separate college teaching trips in Seville.