More and more, I am find that I am stripping down the icon to its core image, and discovering it looks more and more like us. Curiously, the more human the icon appears, the more divine it becomes. I work with mythological figures, and play in that gray area where myth crosses into reality, and the mundane becomes sublime.
The household cat becomes the revered god worshipped by ancient Egyptians. Police and National Guard become the symbols we erect to reestablish order in the chaos of Ground Zero. A wounded man in a loincloth, left alone in the desert to die, becomes Christ, and also suggests the resurrected Osiris, the sun god Apollo, and the pagan god Cernnunos.
Sometimes I am inspired by dreams, sometimes by something as commonplace as a wallpaper pattern. In either case, I draw on theatrical traditions of storytelling, gesture, and scenic design to create pictures that, like a theatre piece, lie somewhere between the real and surreal.
In the famous words of Rod Serling: There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone. |
