This is from my own photo from our television of Rome Shubert, an El Paso TX high school student and star pitcher who narrowly escaped death. In his interview on MSNBC, he has just explained how the shooters bullet went through the back of his head and through his neck–that if it was a millimeter in any direction he could have died or been paralyzed. This image is from just after he speaks, where he is taking in the magnitude of all of what happened and what it represents.

As a son of a psychoanalyst, I have a penchant for the unconscious, and the surreal worlds created in the throes of Modernism, as surrealism breaks into abstraction in automatic drawing and painting. The pixels and noise from the news camera, translated to my high definition TV, camera, and then printer creates distortions that I like to paint as if they are “real”, mapping my subconscious what my conscious can’t ascertain in the already abstracted image. Here, I like think his hair breaks into figurative abstract elements that become a mindscape of what this young man might have just gone through and experienced, a personal nightmare that has become one for all Americans.