During my final months studying with Glen Kessler at the Compass Atelier, our thesis assignment was to develop a body of work around specific subject matter that resonated with us. I’d been struck by a painting done by Alyssa Monks—one of the many artists Glen brought to teach workshops at the atelier. That painting, shown here, entitled Peace, fascinated me. The two figures dissolve into diffuse paint strokes, simultaneously present and vanishing. It inspired my thesis idea of depicting the transitory nature of our existence. We’re born; we thrive; we build up a life’s worth of experience and then that all disappears.

The concept I settled on was figures either emerging from or dissolving into swirling elemental matter. I intentionally left the models unclothed. Clothing anchors a figure to a particular time and I wanted these people, like Monks’s subjects, to feel outside of time. Glen pushed me to vary the expressions on my figures’ faces, which turned out to be the right call since the range of emotions people bring to their own impermanence is wide.

In practice, the swirling matter became as interesting to me as the figures themselves. The undulating lines of water, fire, smoke, clouds, and nebulas, gave the compositions an energy that a figure alone could not. I finished eight or nine of these, which I titled the Metamorphs series.

The photo reference and final result of my painting The Wave

Other Bodies

After moving to San Diego and affiliating with the Studio Door Gallery, I showed in Patric Stillman’s annual Proud+ exhibition for several years. The show skews figurative, which pushed me to make figure paintings that were in keeping with artistic styles I was trying out each given year that had something to say beyond the body itself.

For a later Proud+ entry, I returned to the swirl language from the Metamorphs as a backdrop for monochromatic figures with neon-like highlights. These paintings were done using craquelure where the surface layer of paint is deliberately cracked. Again, this was a revisit to the idea of the impermanence of our existence and more specifically about the impermanence of physical beauty.

For yet another Proud+ show, I created the piece Fade Out which depicts a handsome young man from 1980’s Fire Island who passed away decades ago from AIDS. In my painting, his Polaroid is slowly disappearing—my commentary on how it felt like a previous generation of gay men was slowly being forgotten.

The first of these were two monochromatic paintings of stylized muscle men—Men in the Mirror and Selfie Mirror—inspired by a pose I kept seeing on social media: men photographing their own reflections, eyes aimed at themselves rather than the viewer they were presumably trying to seduce. I thought that made for a subtle commentary on vanity in the present day and I was originally thinking of calling the piece Me Looking at Me Looking at Me. The paintings were a success—at least with visitors to the studio who asked me if they could take a selfie of themselves in the one that contained an actual mirror.

These paintings aren’t well suited to social media as platforms flag them, so they live in a private section of my website, where they can be seen without being moderated out of existence. You can view the webpage featuring the entire collection by clicking the link below:

Mythic Figures Page