Other Paintings
For some thirty years i’ve worked on a lavishly intricate series of large drawings, uniformly titled, “genus”. This name refers to an imagined taxonomy of related works and images. These drawings have been uniformly sized to human proportions, and attempt to strike a disquieting parallel between viewer and work.
I think of this group as an ever emerging bestiary of improbable, biomorphic hybrids. Made of conjoined tree roots, plant parts, displaced organs, insect fragments, and machine parts, the images occupy their frames like fantastical specimens in archival vitrines. In my drawing process, breakdown and recomposition shu¬e familiar anatomies into unexplained, idiomorphic combinations. Formal relationships within the work help tie together these improbable unions.
Obsessively detailed and somewhat illustrative in nature, i hope the work stimulates the viewer with a bit of a jolt, a strange re ection of their own body, along with an unsolved mystery about biological origins. These are much more science ction than science. I recall surrealist progenitor andre breton’s observation that the nature of science is to reassure, and of art to disturb.
