Trick Rider

56” x 100”, Acrylic on canvas
“Trick Rider” is one of a series of paintings of archetypal women placed in a Southern landscape. Although the image is laden with symbolic imagery, there is no literal explanation for the whole painting. It simply cannot be boiled down to a simple narrative statement. Contrarily, it is not just a random collection of images, either. The process of my studio-produced paintings is fundamentally different from my approach to mural painting. Murals are, by necessity, well worked out in advance. Paintings, on the other hand, begin in the studio from a fragment of an idea, an image, a thought, or a starting point that goes through multiple phases with images added and discarded as it seeks to find its authentic identity—one that comports with the original intention.

To me, a successful painting has to work on several levels. It should have elements of humor or sexual tension or a political sense or all three, and it must be painted in a way that supports the subject.