About

Images like these came naturally. As a child, I made elaborately decorated paper hearts, in Easter egg colors, sprayed with perfume wrapped in Saran Wrap, trying endless ways to put together replicas of lilies of the valley and violets.  At the same time, I was drawing pictures of men in science fiction machines that would alter them into superior beings like those I saw in bodybuilding magazines.

Combining multiple images that relate to each other is always puzzling, but the imagery used reflects my anxieties of living in suburbia, and fantasies of being powerful and invulnerable.

In this body of work the images overlap or are attached, and the relative sizes of the figures differ.  Flowers, insects, birds are much larger than people, while the furniture can be smaller or larger. This creates a tension that would not otherwise exist. The men either clothed or nude are decorative, along with the fauna and inanimate objects, but they represent the ideal male physique (or at least what gay culture believes the ideal male should look like.)  Yet these perfect beings are not masters of their environment, they are subject to the creatures and objects that surround them.

After seeing an early R. B. Kitaj Screen print, Vampyr from the portfolio In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, 1969. I began to experiment on methods to construct in acetate what Kitaj had done with screen print.  In this piece, Kitaj portrays a woman happy to see her lover transforming from a vampire bat into a beautiful male. We are witness to the horror and sexual tension at the exact moment of his metamorphosis.

These new pieces combine images of flowers, contemporary furniture, simple celled animals, bodybuilders, insects, comic book superheroes, fashion models and sword and sandal B movie drawings of bound men. They are a result of making collages from pieces of drawings done on acetate, and mechanical pencil drawings similar to David Hockney and Jean Cocteau.