War & Water

Soldier in the Mist....done in 1987...I gave it away to a friend who walked into the studio and said he really liked it. My Dad has forever been asking me where it is. He liked it, too.

Hanging with the boys

Sunlight Yang
This is a much older painting done from memories of the Philippines. The tomb is a medieval reference. It seems to fall into the war painting category, although the fighters are cocks and the general demeanor is laid back. A friend, who is a native New Yorker, told me that it reminded him of any afternoon in a city park.

Embrace

Dark & light, life & death, solid & reflected, green and red...
I look at this painting and see all the tropes of myself right down to the criss-cross of bandages echoed by the X in the grass:
Heart/Ghost

Somewhere in Cimmeria

Sound of Fire

In the Jungle

Here, another war painting about Viet Nam and, in this case, Caravaggio. Its called: Weight of Light. I remember doing research on the machine gun--getting a photo of the exact one they used in Nam, and then rotating it in a drawing to get the perspective right. I don't usually get that obsessive about details, but here it seeemed important. In the Caravaggio (Conversion on the Way to Damascus) its a sword and the helmut is Roman:

Black Sea Lullaby

Now I've gone off on a tangent into my war paintings after posting The Jade Buddha.
Most of them have references to the Viet Nam war, although they often negotiate the dream lands also. This one has embedded itself in my mind in such a way that I perceive it as a dream memory rather than a constructed image. The barriers have become permeable, probably long ago, but I never thought about it till now.

The Jade Buddha/Friday morning

On emerging from the dream world this morning I found that the trek between there and here was a bit more of a no man's land than usual. The dreams had been particularly tense (as in Hollywood thriller with death and sneaking between enemy camps in deep water) and psychedelically dire (as in having someone turn from a bad guy into a cat whom I had to dispatch with a needle into the eye). After surviving the transition between that and the real morning of NYC I celebrated with coffee. I then searched my old painting files for an image to reflect some of the night time events. I found The Jade Buddha, which was inspired by an actual jade Buddha that I saw in China and an old newspaper photo from some forgotten war. And then there are the lilly pads which is my way of being post modern.

Between Un and Ah

This painting was done many years ago. It is one of my son's favorites. The central image of the blindfolded man was taken from a newspaper photo of a Viet Cong prisoner. The two flanking guys are referenced from Buddhist Temple guardians (Un and Ah---in breath and out breath). The place is the Florida mangroves.
Just another day in the life...