“Rice Bowl Boy Goes to War, 2004”

These four panels, full of a variety of colorful images, are painted in oil and acrylic inks on Mylar. There is not a single printed image here, though many areas look as if they were printed. The oil paints and the acrylic inks never cross each other, that is to say, nothing is ever painted on top of something else. The illusion of layers is created by manipulating the colors and the lines. Opposite colors such as blue and orange, naturally push away from each other, and this dynamic can be used by artists to create the illusion of depth, and here, of layering. I wanted this work, whose underlying subject is the war in Iraq and the known cases of prisoner abuse, to reflect the difficulty we have of sorting through the flood of information each of us must confront in order to understand the world we live in.

Many of these images are photographic in their origins, and others originate either in my own drawings or in the works of other artists. I manipulated many of the original pictures by cutting them up and re-pasting them. I used copy machines to increase and decrease the scale of many of the pictures. Using Mylar’s translucent quality, I traced the images -- in some cases repeatedly throughout one or multiple panels. I worked this way to imitate stamping, a very low tech printing process, and also to imitate the way that images of all kinds are repeated over and over in various media of contemporary life.

I composed the picture first in my head, in a general sense. For example, I wanted the boy in the rice bowl to float through the whole painting, and I wanted the whole painting to have bright cheerful colors that swell and bloom like the strings section in an orchestra. I also made decisions about the content of each panel. Each panel has an image from Abu Ghraib prison, but there are many other images. The horse that runs around most of the painting is Smarty Jones, the Philadelphian horse that almost, but not quite, won a triple crown last summer. There are also pictures of gymnast dismounting from the balance beam, a repeated image of a woman sitting on the ground enveloped in her folded garments taken from an ancient Japanese scroll, houses in southern France as I imagined Van Gogh must have seen them, several works by the renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, an image taken from an early Flemish tapestry of a boar hunter, etc. Each image must find its place in the viewers’ eye, coming forward and then receding into the background as the viewer begins to see other things.

Unifying the whole painting is a scene from the beach in Truro, MA, where I have spent each summer over the last decade. With friends gathered around, lounging in the hot summer sun, I collect my thoughts here each year and wanted to have this important part of my life find its place in my work. A close friend and artist, Mark Adams, gave me a picture of us all on the beach, that he had made using photo shop. I blew up the image, a process which drained it of color and turned it into small dots, and then painstakingly copied the image twice, dot by dot, in warm colors on the top and cooler colors on the bottom.

Finally, what I am really trying to produce is an open ended painting, one where a viewer can return and look again and again as the years pass, and find new and valuable connections.