My mentor for this project was Frank Geary, although he doesn’t even know I exist and I doubt if he ever used any of my methods.  He doesn’t endorse me; it was a one sided relationship.  If he tried novel ways of bringing energy into his work, I would too.

I have always been excited about combining opposites and this is just another example.  In the metal girls, I combine two materials: metal and paper.  And, I use a personal style that could be dubbed, Perpetual Synthesis, because I am always trying to resolve dichotomies into a harmonious whole.  My focus in this series is uniting what I consider to be primitive (the loose printing of the linocut) and the refined or cosmopolitan (the silkscreened text and other computer generated images).

I also embrace innumerable points of view.  Thus, multiple aspects of the self are explored with a great variety in materials and methods.  Copper is etched and sometimes also patinated.  There is hot and cold rolled steel, rusted steel, stainless steel and aluminum.

Most importantly, how something is expressed, be it the styling of the text, the esthetics of the screen print image, the use of color, and so on, is the message.

Below are some examples of my methods:

hopkins’ girl and hopkins’ cow are both elegies for the extraordinary Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who is quickly fading out of our cultural consciousness. An attempt is made to entice the viewer into his world of highly evocative word play via contemporary styles of communication using digital tools, all the while knowing that it is futile.  In hopkins’ cow, with time the etched copper poem becomes more and more obscured because is it being gradually obliterated by the patina. And in hopkins’ girl, the beautiful blue patina on the copper eats away at the once vibrant red of the fall leaves around her face.  (In this case, the emulsion on my screen also was eaten away!)

california swimmer girl is about punkishly exposing the structure of computer vectorization for the purpose of exploiting its raw energy and beauty.  It also joins a loosely drawn image (the face) with a photographic image (the shark) and in a twist makes the photographic image almost totally abstract.  To boot, the shark becomes the ocean and they are synthesized into one fear.

In the flowers of orcus (a subset within the don’t soak in the tragedy series, a gestural blind contour drawing of the face was scanned and converted into a vector graphic via a Wacom pen. It was then manipulated in Adobe Illustrator with the calligraphy brush in various iterations, enlarged and reduced and cut-up.  The roses and petals (and I always use the gorgeous JFK rose for the dead I am honoring) were directly copied via Xerox, allowing the cut off at the edges of the 8 1/2 x 11 inch mylar sheets to show in the spirit of an early Frank Gehry house where the structure of a building is exposed for its excitement.  In compiling the images that appear, certain imperfections are allowed to be (while editing out others) in order to gain some additional energy as in the loosely assembled early punk posters.  While smart machines are used as devices for both the development of ideas and control, a deliberate attempt is made to leave enough traces of the human hand and chance to give the composition life.

In and now she wears flowers in her hair, she is beautiful and delicate and everything is delicate and beautiful including her surgeries to make her even more delicate and beautiful.

ninety-one candles is also obvious.

These are simply petite dramas of human experience.