During the late 1970’s I abandoned my usual format of paintings that hung on the wall and began putting legs on the paintings. I designed them as miniature landscapes inhabited by sperm-like shapes that symbolized “men.” The paintings began to take on more social themes dealing with environmental and political ideas. In 1980 I decided to merge many of the ideas into one unified piece, both physically and conceptually. The result was his first large scale project, Variations on Utopia. The assemblage of “table paintings” has a central section that depicts a primitive utopia. From that section grows man’s variations: warfare, genocide, industrialization, urbanization, man-made utopia, and agriculture. The industrialization and genocide sections of the project suffered extensive damage in storage leaving the five undamaged sections as the project’s present state.
- wood, canvas & mixed media