My American Dream: Mystery Train
Iconscape (POTUS), 2017 oil on linen 48 × 32 in. | 121.9 × 81.3 cm
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Iconscape (POTUS), 2017
oil on linen 48 × 32 in. | 121.9 × 81.3 cm

In the previous painting of this exhibition Resurrection (The Trumps Meet The Pope), the Renaissance painting by Pietro Perugino’s 1499 painting Christ on the Sarcophagus is in the background, and behind the Resurrected Christ in that work, is a surreal vertical symbolic eye that appears not just in that painting, but works by Fra Angelica and more, that for me become even perhaps more accurate depictions of what God could be. In my Iconscapes, which I have been creating since college, I am trying to cull from my unconscious the various faces and forms that might appear there, but without illustrating them, animating them into abstract, biomorphic imagery that might be more true to depictions of memories and feelings that anything that would be clearly defined as representational. I created this work during the tumult of last summer, when the egregiousness of the current administration was rising to fuller form, the heinous threats and violence to our democracy, its people and environment becoming more looming, real, and ominous. Almost as if the world of the Resurrection was imploding to an apocalyptic fantasia, I felt the need to paint once again more loosely, the cathartic urge to will my feelings and emotions into being, to expunge them like a tapeworm out of my existence to bring to life elsewhere on canvas.