Galleries
Ancestor Series *
This series of paintings entitled, Ancestors, was conceived during a two-week workshop in 1995, at Anderson Ranch with Chinese painter Hung Liu . The first painting of the series, completed while still in Snowmass, depict a pair of unsavory relatives, a great aunt and a great, great grandmother standing
on the stairs of their front porch in 1936. As a child I remembered dark stories involving moon shining, the Clan and poisonings for insurance money that all revolved around this matriarch, her “maiden” daughter and side-kick sister. Perhaps for that reason I never felt much of a connection to my own forbearers
until my father began writing a book about growing up in the Great Depression entitled The Hard Surface Road. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+hard+surface+road&sprefix=The+Hard+Sur%2Cstripbooks%2C182
This series of paintings entitled, Ancestors, was conceived during a two-week workshop in 1995, at Anderson Ranch with Chinese painter Hung Liu . The first painting of the series, completed while still in Snowmass, depict a pair of unsavory relatives, a great aunt and a great, great grandmother standing
on the stairs of their front porch in 1936. As a child I remembered dark stories involving moon shining, the Clan and poisonings for insurance money that all revolved around this matriarch, her “maiden” daughter and side-kick sister. Perhaps for that reason I never felt much of a connection to my own forbearers
until my father began writing a book about growing up in the Great Depression entitled The Hard Surface Road. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+hard+surface+road&sprefix=The+Hard+Sur%2Cstripbooks%2C182
The opportunity for a scholarship to attend this workdshop (also aptly entitled "Ancestors"), came when as I was taking coursework in Eastern aesthetic philosophy and exploring the Asian concept of ancestors. Contrary to our Western notion of individualism, Eastern philosophy regards each individual as one would regard a single wave in the ocean: inseparable from the waves that come before or from those that come after. As Americans we rarely question the notion of the “self made man”, which to people of the East, seems preposterous. They see themselves as standing on the shoulders of their ancestors and view their own achievements accordingly. I was exhilaration for the chance to explore my relationship to the good and the bad characters in my own ancestry with Hung Liu. The one ancestor with whom I did feel affinity was my grandmother, Anna, who emigrated from Moravia as a small child in 1895. Cast in epic proportions in my father’s story, she is the true heroine, struggling to keep her family together and fed through the Depression.
Fourteen additional canvases followed over the next six years, all based on old sepia photographs that had surfaced when news spread among distant relatives of my father writing a book about his childhood. Some were over a hundred years old, shot before the advent of color photography. Many hours went into comtemplating the people in each of these photographs as I painted them. In the absence of local color, I was free to invoke the colors of my ancesters' world as I envisioned them. I reference their closeness to the land and harshness of their lives with vibrant earthtones. My father's stories, together with my ancesters' steady gazes staring out at me from their photographs, informed my characterization of them. Despite their veracity for me now as actual people, their distance from me is revealed in the passages of thin washes that flow through the backgrounds like metaphors for the passing of time.