#32 "Scarborough Self II"
Personal Panoramas (Assembly of Ancestors)
This body of work was started in Stuyvesant, NY in the early 2000s. After the birth of Olivia, our first daughter, I started to investigate my notions of belonging and family and roots and fate and destiny and blood. Being, at that point, an ex-patriot for over twenty years, I was fascinated by the notion of what I had left behind, and by what I carry within me from the country of my birth. I wanted to create in the material what I had envisioned in the ethereal — the partnership of ancestors marching toward a common goal; the heady exuberance of the familiar sod; the poetry of airing laundry blowing in the winds off the Moors; the temptation to constantly circumnavigate fate, and the sensuousness of birth and death.
I chose the panoramic format because of its illusion of time unfolding, and its ability to marry the apparently discordant. Over the images that I have come to regard as personally iconic, I laid the scribblings of my personal thoughts (as a symbol of how perception creates the world one witnesses) interspersed with the 'Truth' of A Course in Miracles — that tome of wonder that elegantly combines the wisdom of Shakespeare, Freud and Jesus.
Peopled with my family, the death of my father, the birth of my daughter, acts of passion, scenes of splendour, the blooming and fermenting of nature, I see these works as a visual diary of a life lived without the physical presence of the previously familiar — but with its traces tattooed on my desires and as a token of my gratitude for the sense of being a part of something bigger than myself.
The works are archivally printed and available in limited editions of six (plus two artists' proofs) in two sizes — 45" x 6" (unframed) and 90" x 12" (unframed).
#6 Ancestral Sheep
#7 Scarborough Self I
#8 The Persuasiveness of Light
#9 Love, Lust and Larceny
#10 Seagulls and Swings
#11 The Sensuousness of Grace
#12 Sex, Saguaro and Semantics
#13 The Myth of Entanglement