"Crying out for the Dream". I was working on this painting for the last few months. I listen to the radio, often NPR. Hearing all the various news, mainly of the election cycle and the various police shootings and police being shot at. There might be a great deal of tension that is in the air or may be this is just my impression of hearing all of this. I am not saying for sure that this is my impressions, reactions, or idea about what is going on in the US right now. It may but also may not. Is there real anger in and around the US, yes. Will this be a quiet year, no. Will the election campaign between Clinton and Trump be anything but nasty, dirty, brutal, full of accusations and insults? I would say yes. Is this painting about that, or anything else going on in the country and the world? Yes, but don't quote me on that. Okay, that being said, lets take a closer look into this work. What the hell is going on!? Looking at it now after completing it there are several things that spring to my mind. The figures are walking heads, much like most of modern humans. We are generally about our ego, our careers, our lifestyle choices, our this and our that. This is not to say aspiring is bad only that there is a preoccupation with material possessions. What many are finding is that either that getting things and money leads sometimes to unhappiness or that many are finding that the cost of living is a position that is not available to more and more people. Expectations, desires that are disappearing, the idea of progress seems to melt under out feet. The platform seems like both the melting ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic and the basic element of the universe, hydrogen. The hydrogen atom is one electron and one proton. All elements derive from this one element.The things we assume are basic and natural to us appear to be dissolving under out feet. The heads have pyramids on their heads. Dunce caps? Perhaps, but it is more than that. We live by narratives, mythos. We see a world in which the structure is seen as unchanging and/or the natural way things are. We all carry this on us in our lives. Our beliefs, our narratives, are abstract concepts about understanding the world and our place in it. This is both a way of finding an understandable pattern to our existence and our place in such a pattern. This is both a way giving meaning to our lives. It also is a burden that prevents one from changing or challenging their convictions. The denial of death, crying out for the dream that things will always be what they are, but death is always at work. The windmill skulls, the constant movement of everything, building up and breaking down. The eyes going from looking down a path into darkness and then up into the sky. Wisdom of understanding that all things change, all things die, and what life if about is flux, flow, change? Or the hopeful expectation that there is an afterlife or that some miracle of the divine or technology will save us? Or both? The egg comforted on its bed of golden hay soon to plummet into an abyss, and in the center of it all only our mind, brain, body. The figures all walk in step with each other, the unchanging habits of people through time. All heat turns to cold, all systems break down, things must face entropy.

The Ally Painting to those who know the inside story. What can I say about this? I think one of the better images I have done. A mixture of Alice in Wonderland, mutant creatures, a Disney tree (good or evil? Who can tell). It could be dismissed as just a superficial work, and maybe true. In Grad school this was sort of called out as superficial by one professor. Or because I didn't make work that fit into the assumed idea of figurative work, too much like the past and/or too much like illustration. It has the problem that Tom Wolf talked about in his book 'The Painted Word", without a theory how can anyone see this? This gets into the problem with academia, and the idea of art making in general. The idea that you must continue in the accepted idea of linear progress of art from the impressionist to the conceptual art of every kind, or rather, you must make art that is 'radical', breaking from something in the past. Fair enough, only that I think in terms of visual impact not something that can only embraced because it illustrates a concept. I may be letting my experience in grad school get to me about this work. There is symbolic inferences and motifs in this work that I see after I completed it. The tree, like nature can be benevolent or malevolent, or both. The woman can be the animus of the male, the feminine aspect of the male sex, that guides the strange rabbit creature, the jackaraffe. The giraffe is a very strange creature, otherworldly, it is no wonder Dali was intrigued by them. The rabbit heads (rather jack rabbit heads) are symbolic of the sexual aspect of the male. The saying of a rabbit, breading like rabbits, since they have lots of reproductive sex, can also be analogous to the male sex drive, but in its more adolescent or immature form. The woman is guiding the creature, as it is heading down the lower path she holds it at bay effortlessly it seems. Directing it to the upper path. At the same time she can enjoy a corn dog. Yes, it is obviously a penis! But also that the feminine is about both control and emotive expression. The Jungian aspect of the feminine is one of guiding, the divine feminine leading the more aggressive aspect of the male nature to greater understanding. The plants about the tree and path are also sexual in nature. Let us be honest, flowers, fruit, etc. are organs of reproduction. Fruit is used to lure animals to eat it and then spread the seeds. The flower is the sexual organ to attract insects to pollinate other flowers. I would say that within being alive, being not just human, but living organism, we are constantly in play about life. This is not just the act of sex, that is one way, but within us we imagine, dream, desire, hope, etc. that is about moving forward, growing or if I can bring in Carl Jung, transforming and individuating. The title is The Walker, and in life we are moving forward in time, we age but we also change, we are living and in that we search. Search for friendship, for love, for sexual pleasure, for meaning, for accomplishments. Men may in youth be hungry for lots of sex but then may change and desire something more than an erection, something less transitory. Money, love, children, education. Perhaps I am reading too much into this?

This is a painting that came from my interest in mythology, and in particular with native american mythology. For some time now I have found the notions of mythology and religion to be very interesting. Myths and religions are stories or narratives that people embrace in common about the way the world works, how things happen, etc. The title for this work is Psychopomp Manabohzo. Psychopomp is a word that Carl Jung had used to describe a spirit guide, a being that guides the souls of the living from life to death. Every belief system has some kind of symbolic figure. In this instance I was reading about certain native american ideas of the rabbit, the Manabohzo. This rabbit figure is a creator god, creating life, creating the deer, master of knowledge and a guide to the souls of the living. Its not a literal translation. I was not illustrating anything. It seemed to perk something in my mind, an image like this came to me. How I got from reading a book on the subject to the final image is one that I cannot explain. The idea of death, life, how all this came to be I find striking. In this supposed age of rational thought, where superstitious ideas are thought to be in the past. I feel that we treat death as something to be avoided, not dealt with, not to be mentioned. But for all our supposed wisdom there is something cold about the way we live and the way we die. The blanket assumption of those inclined to the dualism of everything, that we die and poof! in the afterlife of either heaven or hell. It is perhaps why i find the accent mythologies, belief systems so interesting, There was such a complex idea of what happens, how things happen. Granted, of course there was a great deal that we would find very unappealing about the past. That being said, I find that we live by narratives, not by facts, we live by values with an underlying mythos at the base of those values.