Abstracts
For abstract artists who trust the subconscious and rely on it for deeper, more unfiltered truths there lies a danger. Often the subconscious takes us to areas where no light can penetrate…to subterranean recesses populated by our most primal dreads and fears. After spending six months in one of these dark places working on a series of more than one hundred paintings inspired by Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, I found myself sorely in need of looking up, in this case at the night sky, where I imagined myself a shepherd on a Greek hillside drawing pictures with the stars. The series of paintings arising from this experience came to be called Constellations.
Civilization and its Discontents, a series of over 50 paintings done in 2017, draws its inspiration and title from a small but brilliant book written by Sigmund Freud in 1929. In it Freud examines what he considers to be the central conflict in human civilization and culture, a conflict created by two antithetical forces. One force is the instinctual demand of the individual for complete and unfettered freedom to act upon impulse, however base or primitive. The counter force is civilization’s demand for conformity to norms and laws, the repression of primitive impulses (such as incest, rape and murder) and the sacrifice of individual instinct and desire for the preservation of social order.
According to Freud, the intensity of the social friction caused by these forces fluctuates from epoch to epoch, culture to culture and generation to generation and depends upon a complex of religious, political and economic factors. Where America lies on the continuum at this point in its history, as wells as how Freud’s concept informs and is relevant to the times we live in, I leave to your reflection. My reflections are the paintings before you.
Subtitled “The Passion Through the Eyes of Peter,” this exhibition premieres over fifty new abstracts that study the final drama in the life of Jesus from the imaginary perspective of his closest disciple. Each work, drawn from Biblical as well as historical references, humanizes an individual event from The Passion by interpreting it through the emotional and psychological lens of a man whose courage and revolutionary conviction would eventually fail him three times when put to the ultimate test.