paintings
PLOWED UNDER, 11' wide 6' high
The painting above was a piece that I completed in the fall of 2019 during a residency at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston SC.
The image is a re-interpretation of a small Thomas Hart Benton drawing in the collection of the museum. My middle name is Benton and only learned late in life that the muralist is a cousin of mine which perhaps justifies my admiration for his work . Having established the main image, as I often do, I used the border to further expound the subject. In this case, I used images from the museums miniature collection and their sculptural pieces to place in context the image of this archetype, man and beast in the field, surrounded by our collective ancestors.
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 and takes me and potentially the viewer to a thought provoking place.
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.
The painting above was a piece that I completed in the fall of 2019 during a residency at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston SC.
The image is a re-interpretation of a small Thomas Hart Benton drawing in the collection of the museum. My middle name is Benton and only learned late in life that the muralist is a cousin of mine which perhaps justifies my admiration for his work . Having established the main image, as I often do, I used the border to further expound the subject. In this case, I used images from the museums miniature collection and their sculptural pieces to place in context the image of this archetype, man and beast in the field, surrounded by our collective ancestors.
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 and takes me and potentially the viewer to a thought provoking place.
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.
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