"Cycles of the Unconscious" - Summer 2006
A la Pupe Aquatints - Series of 12 editions of 7
The content of the series is a visual narrative of the history of mankind. I used symbols and imagery from several ancient mythologies, various religions such as Kabbalah, Christianity, and Alchemy, Jungian archetypes, and Tarot. Inspiration for this series was derived from paying close attention to my dreams and observing the way in which diverse subjects came together in a vague yet significant surreal collage. After I became familiarized with my own dream imagery, I began to compile notes and sketches from much research done in the aforementioned subjects, particularly C.G. Jung's work on the collective unconscious. The story begins with a piece entitled "The Promise," a pair of aged folded hands wearing an Ouroboros ring, suggesting the potential of a unified mankind. The journey follows man in the infancy of ancient religion, the struggle of obedience to a god, the discovery of the ego and its consequences, spiritual enlightenment, scientific enlightenment, the affect of science and archaeology on things presumed sacred, and the inevitable argument that follows. The series ends with "The Wasteland," titled after Eliot's poem defining his war-torn generation, a pair of floating hands holding a blank page in the foreground of a glacier, leaving the future open to any turn of action in spite of the shattered history behind it.
"Surreal Portraits" - On going collection
These represent the bulk of my work. I have been exploring concepts of identity via portraiture since I started painting in college. Because identity is a vague thing, but extremely intimate and important to each of us, I have opted to use the face as a language for defining it. However, if I were to offer too much detail or give away too many distinguishing features of an individual, the deeper subconscious emotional characteristics of identity would become obscured.