Portraits
My transition in coming to Berlin in 2002, without any contacts, permission to work, money or knowledge of the language and customs, was relatively smooth, considering my previous experience of feeling like a foreigner in my own country, America. It seemed critical to document this 'outsider' experience, combined with the internal and external pressure to conform to the expectations of society, in the two series St. Benedict's Patient #6310 (2002) and Arbeiter (Worker) (2002).
The St Benedict's Patient #6310 series, consisting of 25 sequential paintings, reveals the despair and loneliness of a "dark" figure, who searches into the distance with hope and longing for some salvation, peace, or God.
Arbeiter, a series of eleven paintings, contrasts the monotony and simplicity of a worker's life with the complexity and depth of a magical, supernatural world.
These paintings document my experiences of alienation in both Germany and America and challenge the viewer with the question: What is the value of a human life which does not adhere to the common standards of society?
Technically, these two series use both a repetitive woodblock image, which homogenizes the portraits, and the colorful, spontaneous watercolor painting underneath, which expresses the profound and timeless: the supernatural world in and around the figures. Also, I incorporated in these series the idea of the 'angel wings' of the Renaissance to continue an historical theme in Painting: to describe in plastic terms the relationship and transitions between the visible and invisible realities.
Whereas St. Benedict's Patient #6310 and Arbeiter series openly show the physical and metaphysical worlds, and hence became surrealistic in nature, the Five Seasons (2004-) and the Jan (2005-) series have, in most part, a faithful, realistic re-presentation of the classical portrait. This transition was a natural evolution in my ideas to be non-judgemental, by portraying the full spectrum of our perception, the still object and the moving object, and yet within this rigid order to find expression for the extraordinary and those elements beyond our vision. Through the many sequential poses in each of these series and through the subtle differences between the portraits themselves, I challenge the viewer to discern the true representation or identity of the sitter, just as I pose yet more questions in my work: Is there only one true objective reality? Or an absolute Truth? Do we have the capacity to perceive it?
Five Seasons(2004-) is an installation of thirteen paintings, each consisting of twenty-eight (28) self-portraits, or one lunar month, and totalling three hundred and sixty-four (364) portraits, or one solar year. As the title suggests, the series of paintings follow the rythym and cycle of the five seasons, which could represent Time, Space, or any given interval of time and space(i.e., a moment, a day, a lifetime, etc.). Instead of the woodblock printmaking of the earlier series, these paintings use a type of monoprintmaking where the drawn portrait on the reverse side prints an image onto the other, colored side. Thus, there is recorded two faces, both a positive and a negative, symbolizing the two viewpoints or sides of a mirror. How a person sees him/herself is quite different to how the world sees him/her, and vice versa.
In addition, the five seasons themselves are an energetic "print", or encoded system which shows the external energies of the environment's influence upon the internal dynamic of an individual. Color,for example, varies in the landscape and through the changing of the seasons, and corresponds, I believe, to an ever shifting movement within each person. Five Seasons reveals this progression of each color and it's respective season upon the figure: green for spring, red/summer, yellow/late summer, white/fall, black-blue/winter. By painting these varied transitions in each of the thirteen paintings, I am re-examining the themes of the figure/ground relationship and the interrelationship of humans and their ecosystem.
The Jan (2005-) series started with a portrait entry, Jan (2005), in an international portrait competition, and eventually developed into a year (2005) intensive study and research project about human perception and it's limits to discern the truth due to the pitfalls of mental constructions and judgements. The group of twenty-five(25) paintings continues the themes of the Five Seasons(2004-) series, yet differs due to a strong emphasis on realism and a switch to oil painting. The two painting series Body and Soul (2006) and Quantum (2006) and the two drawing series One Second, One Life (2005) and Ten Seconds (2005) each have six works in an horizontal row and they blend the boundaries between painting, photography and film.
These developments and explorations in portraiture over the last four years has inspired the upcoming series: Light Bodies, Born in Amerika, and Questioning Authority, where I intend to merge surrealism and realism into a new form, and to express my viewpoints about ethics, as they relate to contemporary themes and events.
