Put most simply, my work is about Humanity, War and Peace. It is a study in archetypes: The Hero, the dark horse, the white horse, the beauty queens, Juliette re-imagined as D'ua Khalil, the burning bridge, the isolated traveler (the astronaut), death, and the stable, and eternal mountain. The current series is an illustration of my view of current state of War around the globe and through history. It is an acknowledgment of both its presence and the miraculous peace that surrounds me personally.
Modern warfare something that is alien to the collective American psyche. Americans have never experienced the reality of war as civilians. The case has been that for the last 120 years or so American victims of war are not children, they are not women in the market place or students in Universities. In this way, American society can conceive of this kind of violence as something that happens between young men and a few women, but only people in the military and only in lands far from home. I painted the beauty queens in part to refer to this naiveté and in part because the events like beauty pageants or sports events, however meaningless show a society that is comfortable and safe. One can be concerned with these things one is not concerned with survival, I chose an image from the 50's to herald a time when America was enjoying great success and it is a time that many believe we still live in and idealize.
I painted the ocean and the mountain to acknowledge that the tragedy of war and miracle of peace are specifically human concerns, that no matter how much like Armageddon our violence is or how much like paradise our peace, the greater universe is neither injured nor healed, that we are not acting for or against God, but for or against ourselves. And this way I hope to illustrate that humanity's failures and successes belong only to us, and I see that war in only “holy” because we make it so. When the bridge is burned, it is we who can no longer cross it; the sun still rises, the river still flows, etc.
On an artistic and technical level, I wanted to understand how the minimalist painter Gerhard Richter does his work. In part because I was so in awe of his technical skill, it seemed inhuman and divine in its perfection. I guess I needed to humanize his talent, so I studied his work and practicing his methods until I started to see how it was done. The difference of course, is his skill and discipline remain unsurpassed, and while his work is minimalist in that it rarely contains a metaphor, one is simply amazed by how well he puts oil paint to canvas, the importance and relevance is the perfection of his color and textural accuracy. My work departs from this minimalist perspective and is rife with allegory, metaphor. I try to infuse it with my own, feminist ideologies, I try to make it look like a woman's hand painted it. Many of my pieces are painted specifically to appeal specifically to a young, naive, feminine eye. I see war as a mostly male endeavor a masculine act both in its tragedy and heroics, thus the painting of Capt M'baye Diagne, where as the feminine experience is often totally silent or absent
form the narrative of history.
I wanted this series to be a kind of simple and quiet protest, somewhat like Jean Claude Monet when he gifted his enormous panels of water lilies to the French government as a request for peace during the first WWII. Ultimately I have a perspective that is as removed from the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, as those lilies are from the trenches in Europe. I see that act of painting as opposite of going to war, the end result is creation rather than destruction, it is an act related to Philia, the love of humanity, for this reason the title of the current show is derived from the poet Cheri Moragas poem of the same name:
