STATEMENT OF WORK

STATEMENT 2025:  Re: 'the gamble'

This series of work uses the playing card as a jump off point. The images are painted on top of patterns printed directly from a cookie jar that was in my mother’s kitchen. Most of the patterns created by printing directly from the cookie jar are obscured by the painting process. Remnants of the background print are only visible around the outer edge of the canvas creating a framework. (See 'the gamble" video) Each painting evolves in response to the printed surface inspired by the iconography and the graphic intention of a specific card. 

Playing cards are rich with historical, political, and religious symbolism. The images evolved over the centuries crossing and integrating cultural boundaries.  They are a tool in support of the culture of gambling, a culture of money, a culture that deifies royalty. Playing cards are almost always viewed the same upside down and right side up as a sort of mirror image, yet flipped providing a sort of self reflection, but a bit skewed - not unlike our own self image of the identity of white America. 

Personal experience is the backdrop for opinions as well as bias. These paintings are exploring a relationship to risk, an addiction to wealth and a severe reckoning with what white Americans in this and the last century have held dear as our highest ideals.Through the process of painting instinctively and reflectively, each work is distilled into a single element that defines and deconstructs an American mythology. 

ABOUT DIRECT PRINTING and Why I Often Use it in my paintings:

Soon after the twin towers fell in 2001, I visited a small catholic chapel up on a hill in Lodi, NJ to get a good view of those 88 beams of light shining up from the ruins of the towers. The chapel was jammed with life sized replicas of the Shroud of Turin as well as a large selection of relics from saints. 

There was so much energy stored there. Memory is stored in revered places as well as in objects, bodies and bones. That visit had me thinking about a ‘relic’ as life energy saved of a revered person. I began to explore this rarely used printmaking process - direct printing. I eventually printed bones, deer carcasses, dead birds, tools, the human body, mostly mine but also animals and other people. I documented myself speaking sign language.

The physical world is remembered when I print directly from an object  The surface texture of an object is recalled. The volume of the object is flattened.