recent paintings....

I thought I'd start using this to document the progress of my work.  I'm not good at keeping my ideas in one place and when I am able to find ideas that I put down I realize that I change my mind pretty frequently and am convinced of one thing one day and something totally different the next.  

Here are a few paintings that are in progress that are up on my studio walls at the moment.  For the time being, I am interested in identity and am addressing that through the lens of culture.  

I vacillate between feeling totally immersed in the each of the diverse socio-cultural groups that I associate myself with – or feeling like I am drifting on their peripheries, looking in at something vaguely familiar, even foreign.  I am passionately protective, and privately insecure about my place.  I am arrogant, and humbled to be part of something so exclusive.  

I deal with questions related to this dilemma daily.  My art reflects that.  With it, I struggle to distinguish the indistinguishable, for identity is fluid. Identity is subjective.  The very term “identity” deceptively seems to describe something finite.  I don’t know who the heck I am sometimes, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I'm working on a series of Gauguin paintings where I am inserting myself, a modern Polynesian person, into the scene as the main figure.  I'm also working on a series of tropical plants in topiary pots.  I thought the juxtaposition of something seen as wild or utilitarian in one society, and only decorative/aesthetic in another might be interesting.

18x24" Oil on canvas

18x24" Oil on canvas

24x36" Oil on canvas

24x72" Oil on canvas - 2 panels