Collage

Shanghai Salad is intimately linked with my 2019 visit to Shanghai where I got a sort of food poisoning by eating incredibly spicy hot pot. My assistant, Shaw, a young woman from Wuhan, was hellbent to dine in this firebreathing hot pot joint where everything was lacquered and upholstered in shades of red. Steaming pots of broth were brought to the table along with a variety of meat, seafood, and vegetables and - most conspicuously - large dark red bricks of red pepper boullion which Shaw eagerly added to the soup which then turned an infernal red color in the center of the table where we could add ingredients to taste.

Pulp and Circumstance is a sieries of digital collages made from pulp magazine sources (that inexhaustible trove!). These digital collages have served as the basis for works that have transformed into large scale into oil paintings.

Succubus - A 21st Century She-Devil personifying the automated collective consciousness vampirizing the soul of the individual. She is playing with her cellphone, a man bound helplessly to the screen. From her pineal gland to his crotch area extends an ambiguous energy beam. She towers over an archaic fantasy city. Her skin is embedded with circuity, and she wears a sort of chrome armor bikini. It is at once an allegory for humanity's relationship with the internet, and a satire of old courtship games invented with social media and smartphones.

The painting was presented at Burning Man 2018. It was art for the 'I, Robot' Theme of the festival and was installed in the "Man Pavillion" at the three o'clock position of the pedestal on which the Man was mounted.

This is a series of watercolors I began while staying in Tokyo in the Fall of 2015. They are what I could do with watercolors and ink pens of various sorts (I was especially enthralled with the brush pens available everywhere in Tokyo). I would improvise something on one page of a small watercolor block in a few hours and then start another. About 20 were completed in all, and I later came to call them "Acceptance", because the improvisational nature of the drawing felt like a kind of self-acceptance that really differed from the exacting standards of the large scale "Crossroads of Curiosity" I had createdin 2014-15.

Benediction is a continuation of acrylic paintings based on animation stills. The original animation was part of a sieries called 'Ultra Shorts' (owing to their extreme brevity) which were displayed online as animated .gifs.

Malpractice was created for the Institue of Crazyology Show in 2013. It began as a digital collage before being paited over with acrylic. This piece has been shown before as an Ilumination

Mistress, May I? is a provocative painting that grapples with the commodification and fetishization of gender, sexuality, and race.

Believe it or not, this is my one and only effort to make anything resembling a comic strip. "Start small" is advice I just can't seem to ever listen to. Nope, I had to start with a graphic novel of a very complex sci-fi classic, Philip K. Dick's, "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (one of my all time favorite books!). I didn't quite get as far as finishing one chapter. I guess it's nothing to brag about, but I think I was off to a good start, and, who knows, may return to it if the stars align . . .