Paintings

Each medium has its own language.
-Dale Conner

Oil painting on panel allows for a firmer touch plus the ability to attach materials other than paint to its surface. My paintings A Bad B Horror Movie and The Ties That Bind are examples of this. 

Oil on canvas provides a softer, more flexible feel when paint is applied to the surface. Manipulation of oil paint is more “giving,” an effect I prefer at times. 1914 - 1918 and Room 101 are oil paintings on canvas.

Humanity’s penchant for destruction, a special form of insanity that we human beings suffer collectively, has been the driving theme of my work since the 1980s. My thoughts and concerns regarding the Madness of Man, the name I use for my oeuvre, were validated when I discovered and read English poet Wilfred Owen, who died in action in 1918 at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice that ended World War I. His war-themed poetry validated my belief that man’s desire and ability to inflict mass destruction on a horrific level, both on the battlefield and in the natural environment, is intrinsic to being human and observable since our humble beginnings. The even more horrific and inconceivable update to World War I is that, in our modern time, we have the technology to completely destroy the planet and ourselves with it.

This is an excerpt from Owen’s poem Dulce et decorum est:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This Latin phrase was written by the Roman poet Horace and means “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” It is my intent to convey, in painting and in printmaking, images that speak to the consequences of this powerful lie and that address the dominant, driving force behind man’s lethal behaviors: GREED.

My approach to making drawings, prints, and paintings is fundamentally the same. I begin with a basic idea and, from that point, I allow the work to have a life of its own.  For me, the concept of preliminary drawings does not allow the freedom required when developing the work’s message as the painting or print unfolds. Therefore, a preconceived image, for me, is too formulaic and does not allow for the evolution of a visual statement. Basically, I stumble around until the work tells me to stop.