This is an image appropriated from an old NASA photo of the planet Jupiter. The Great Red Spot is on the bottom right, and Ganymede (as well as some of the other moons) appears as one of the dark circles in one of the rings. When I began this painting, part of the series of my show Kings & Queens, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to make a painting of this image I have wanted to create for many years, as it’s the “king of planets.” As an allegory, as part of the nonlinear narrative exhibition, I was also thinking of it being a “gas planet”: an imposing, somewhat apocalyptic image of what our planet may one day resemble if we continue our addiction to fossil fuels. Jupiter is also the Roman name for Zeus, a character, along with Ganymede, made another appearance in the show in their mythological forms. Most of all, I have a penchant for the Kantian notion of the sublime and feel that there is nothing more that can evoke this feeling of being a small part of a much larger, ineffable existence that we can’t ultimately understand, than looking at the uncanny views of other planets.

I paint both abstract and figurative images and am interested in how the abstract paintings “come together” into figurative elements upon contemplation, and how my figurative paintings “fall apart” into abstraction. As I’m painting an image, I listen to appropriate music (in this case, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Mahler, and more), and think about what the picture means to me as I’m describing the abstract notions of positive and negative space, form, light, color, and so on. I hope that much like a method actor can infuse life into their lines by impacting their roles with real memories and experiences from their own life, I can give paintings an emotional and experiential life by thinking about dreams, memories, and ideas the allegory of the image provokes as I paint. I hope that this work contains the qualities of both my abstract and my representational paintings in that each line, or swirl, in the planet breaks into almost calligraphic symbols of my unconscious, and the whole entity of the planet is infused with a lifelike feeling.