New Series

A few Weeks ago I completed a painting I should have finished a couple months ago. Its been a big struggle. My personal life has been hectic. Just relocated my living situation and studio back to Albuquerque, NM among other personal mishaps. Either way It is a new work that marks the beginning of a new series that focusses more on the narrative of objects that are specifically tied to the various cultures and landscapes of New Mexico and the greater southwest. These paintings are moving away from depicting a scene or a happening. I am attempting to remove the viewer as a voyeur of a scene, as is commonplace in most figurative works including my own. Call it a compromise. I don't want to lose the entrancing effect of the classic Tromp le oil illusion that captivates an audience, however I wish to attempt to include the viewer in the work visually and culturally and moreover allow the viewer to become a participant in the new evolving narrative of life. These works are largely in the mode of Early Mexican Muralists such as Rivera and Orosco in the way that they are almost historical narratives that are rewritten in another cultural perception. Much like these muralists, the main focus of these works is education on culture and yet it they are also a political statement of resistance toward the submission to a homogenous industrial culture. The work I am in the process of beginning is focused on the dynamics of art, education, medicine, and agriculture as they pertain to a counterculture that is resisting the dominant culture of our time. We seem to be at a crossroads of potential change in world culture and awareness and a there is a strong shift or resistance toward recognizing the merits of indigenous beliefs at they relate to the scientific evidence we are beginning to understand. Evidence that supports a way of life where we are in balance with our environment and not the dominant self-righteous and self important species that destroys all for profit and takes everything for granted. A shift toward a new cultural and spiritual awareness that evolves to a point of both recognition of these long time mystical beliefs, and a regeneration and recontextualization of the ceremonies centered around these beliefs. Organic food, holistic medicine, "Green Economy". These are just some of the new shifts that mark a mental migration back to the ways of our ancestors. I am attempting to further these beliefs as well as document them for future generations incase the scale keeps tipping the way it is now and we end up in a science fiction version of life that is bleak and totally disconnected from the organic relationship between humans and our mother, Gaia. (the earth) In this way this new work is a fusion of propaganda and historical/ documentary work that focusses on the continual survival of our culture and our species through the acknowledgment of superior forces(to man) that play a huge role in the outcome of our grand imagination and self awareness.