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As an artist working within the purview of the critical forum in New York, a forum that has hitherto offered very limited access to landscape painting and landscape photography, I have been searching for curators and others who might see that there is room and even a call for a rethinking and a new presentation of landscape as a genre.

For instance, the BAG Gallery in Brooklyn recently mounted an exhibition titled Surface: Contemporary Artists Interpret Landscape, curated by Michele Jaslow, that included my work (the piece titled Ponytail). This is but a beginning in a presentation of the new thinking currently happening by visual artists about landscape, about it having something to tell us in our current day.

Although the work you see is beautiful, I am not talking about merely pretty pictures in what I have done in this last year and to date. I have conceived of a series of paintings that I call Loaded Landscape. Our regard for landscape in every way has always been about activity of mind. From far back in human history we have involved ourselves with the promotion of certain places as recognizable types to which we attach (impose) meaning pertinent to our deepest impulses, aspirations, and ambitions.

Generally, the landscapes I find compelling are just that, pure landscapes, natural manifestations. However, besides these, in my study I include the physical things that we place on the land such as structures of utility, or religious markers and monuments. However, as I find my study in this respect I try nevertheless to choose landscapes that show minimal human interjection while discriminating among the possibilities for maximal impact in those terms I indicate above.

My series of large paintings titled Cage have as their thematic basis the ultra-hyped modern sporting phenomenon called Fight Club (this is not the movie), the cleaned-up-for-prime-time name for a largely (at first) illegal hybrid sport that consisted of aspects of no-rules Greco-Roman wrestling along with the pugilism and form of circle fights (which became modern boxing) that were widely enjoyed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Today, as we search for the extreme experience in nearly every sport, cage fighting has nearly replaced boxing in popularity. The Greco-Roman aspects of the down-and-dirty always found at the edges of gentlemanly circle fighting have gained both social legitimacy and legality in the form of modern cage fighting. These contests of extreme classical wrestling and brutalizing fisticuffs have now moved up and out of the hidden places of the demimonde, out from the back alleys and derelict buildings with space enough to accommodate a cyclone fence ring and a small crowd, into modern arenas.

My very large paintings of cage fights present as send-ups of the scene. However, they also ambiguously function as pictures that positively acknowledge some of the basic and perhaps old-fashioned humanist themes of art, such as conflict and beauty. In these pictures I have exaggerated the features of the competitors to such a degree that sometimes the heightened ferociousness of the imagery projects out at the viewer as a blast of human feral angst. Yet, standing back, it is my hope that a viewer cannot help but see that all parts of these paintings cohere in essential pictorial truth.

Perhaps one of the most successful paintings here is Cage—Undefeated—Cut Man. The painting takes issue with a fighter’s claim of victory that is often belied by his extremely battered condition—sometimes to a point of absurdity. Broken arms are not uncommon for both match participants. Beautiful blood, perhaps sangre de dio, presents in these pictures as something that is (directionally) base yet also as something worn as the essential and emblematic signifier of a neglectful society that forces a boy to walk the manly way.

This large piece also presents as a giant mock-up of a poster like those designed to hype Fight Club events. I have taken many of the macho phrases in their graphically bold styles as a design aspect for this painting. Words of bluff and bravery in ultra-large Times Roman Bold and an abstraction of the gold belts awarded Fight Club champions with the words Circus-Circus cover and weigh upon the supposed winner of the fight. A large star, a point of glory (for good service young man?) pokes the victor’s eye as it points across to the words by which he might live, if only it were happily.

Cage - Marquess of Queensbury What? - Ground and Pound

Dec. 2007
Acrylic enamels on linen
170cm x 265cm

Me painting Ground and Pound

2007

Cage - Undefeated - Cut Man

Jan. 2008
Acrylic enamels on linen
180cm x 240cm

Cage - The Victor -Smashmouth

2007
Acrylic enamels on linen
190cm x 250cm

Stairs to No Where

2008
oil on linen
270cm x 330cm

Golgotha Road

2008
oil on linen
270cm x 330cm

Pony Tail

2008
oil on linen
138cm x 175cm

Broken Mandible

2008
oil on linen
188cm x 265cm

The Bridal Veil Nourishes the Living Rock

2008
oil on linen
265cm x 190cm

Detail, The Bridal Veil...

2008
oil on linen
265cm x 190cm

North End, Sisters: Faith, Hope, Charity

2008
oil on linen
215cm x 312cm

On the Incoming Tide (Hudson River)

2009
oil on linen
135cm x 315cm

Adrift on a Warming Sea

2
oil on linen
150cm x 120cm