Catapulted into a new perspective on life and a gruesome awareness of how the human mind tries to make sense of its surroundings after an extended period in my early forties, I use symbolism from events historically known to be layered with propaganda and manipulative messaging in my work to illustrate aspects of the human psyche. The decades long era of the Cold War, now rotting in the rear-view mirror of history offers ample material for dissection into how susceptible we can be to covert messaging and how we want or tend to believe things are as they appear. For these two works, The Zone I and II, I’ve made references to the aftermath of the meltdown of the reactor at Chernobyl in 1986, and the long-lasting effects that created the eerie environment that exists in its wake, still unsafe for human habitation. To create the references I worked from, I found dolls from the same period as those being played with by the children of Pripyat at the time of the event. Of course they didn’t arrive from the eBay seller in terrible shape, so I helped them along a bit :), and then went forward gathering the remaining props and shooting the pics in controlled low colored light. The works are executed in acrylic on 90lb Stonehenge rag paper. The degree of rendering ranges from representational to immediate marks that only fractionally describe forms made with translucent quinacridone pigments.

The Zone I and The Zone II Catapulted into a new perspective on life and a gruesome awareness of how the human mind tries to make sense of its surroundings after an extended period in my early forties, I use symbolism from events historically known to be layered with propaganda and manipulative messaging in my work to illustrate aspects of the human psyche. The decades long era of the Cold War, now rotting in the rear-view mirror of history offers ample material for dissection into how susceptible we can be to covert messaging and how we want or tend to believe things are as they appear. For these two works, The Zone I and II, I’ve made references to the aftermath of the meltdown of the reactor at Chernobyl in 1986, and the long-lasting effects that created the eerie environment that exists in its wake, still unsafe for human habitation. To create the references I worked from, I found dolls from the same period as those being played with by the children of Pripyat at the time of the event. Of course they didn’t arrive from the eBay seller in terrible shape, so I helped them along a bit :), and then went forward gathering the remaining props and shooting the pics in controlled low colored light. The works are executed in acrylic on 90lb Stonehenge rag paper. The degree of rendering ranges from representational to immediate marks that only fractionally describe forms made with translucent quinacridone pigments.