The Great Separation
These paintings express the connections between the transcendent and narrative nature of religious iconography and the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. The creative determination that one’s knowledge will lead outside the realm of possibility is similar to the hope and expectations offered by religious belief. I have reinterpreted, or opened up, the history of the space race within a theological frame, connecting the messianic zeal of rocket and space scientists, cosmonauts, and astronauts with the certainty and longing for transcendence of 11th and 12th century Christian religious belief. The cosmonauts and astronauts in these works are depicted as saints of the space age. Blasted beyond the protection and gravity of the earth, the space explorers entered the mythic realm of heaven. This separation from the known world altered the way we, earthlings, understand our place in the universe. However, few have risked death and experienced the reality of being in space. These works express that existence as an experience of the divine, the knowing of a saint. I reference Russian and Byzantine icons and iconography to place cosmonauts and astronauts as saints, floating in space, as the new religious hope, as seers and prophets, as catalysts for imagination and ideas.
Moon Drawings 2007–2011
My drawings lead me toward a culturally layered, aesthetic understanding of the moon’s surface. Because I cannot observe the subject first hand, I record a sense of the astronaut’s impressions of the bizarre and blasted wastelands of the moon. I draw the extremes of light and dark unknown on earth, the beaten and pitted surface of the moon, and the surface evidence of the astronaut’s movements. The collage presentation NASA created from the astronaut’s photos of the moon forms the underlying structure of my initial moon drawings. In their making, the drawings also recorded the physical actions of my marks, attempts to impress the moon into the paper. The larger drawing, aftrmath, records the end scene of a fantasy battle between those who first dreamed of travel to the moon and the American cowboys who walked there. The broken rayguns and Colt 45 pistols have become part of the moon’s blasted surface.
The drapery surveillance drawings of 2011 place art making and imagination within the dreams of extraterrestrial existence. The drapery study, floating around the moon or integrated into the moonscape, represents a beginning, a focused first looking toward future works of art. It is exquisite of itself signaling an evolving realization of possibility, discovery and manifestation. America’s triumph in the moon race is one chapter in the narrative of universal evolution. With the first step onto the moon, the state of both bodies changed and the efforts and aspirations of many became reality. The celestial realm opened further and nation states with the Baroque excess of capital, intellect, and imagination necessary to move past earth’s atmosphere will continue to influence human and cosmic evolution. My drawings document art as means for American surveillance of foreign endeavors on and about the moon and the presence of art in the ongoing narrative of an extraterrestrial society.