The process for this latest set of paintings is difficult but I am enjoying the challenge. The genesis was the goat painting: the painting I did of myself as a child on the beach: the painting where I could not get myself to paint my own face as a child so I painted the face of a goat (when thinking about the significance of the goat I must admit that there is no symbolism behind it. What happened that day that I was painting myself as a child was pretty much the same thing that happened in the origin story of the Hindu, elephant-headed god, Ganesha: One day the goddess Durga was bathing. She did not want to be disturbed so she created a guard for the door out of flakes of her skin. Durga’s husband arrived and, having been stopped at the door by this guard, the god of the Himalaya, Shiva, blasted the guard’s head off. Durga was distraught—the guard was like a son to her, created by her. In a panic, Shiva ran out to replace the head of the guard. The first creature he came across was a baby elephant and that is how the elephant-headed god of India was created…and that is how my goat-child was created. Unable to paint my own face as a child because of trauma, I looked around and the first thing I saw was a painting I had done of a goat’s head while in India).
I had decided that if I was going to explore the trauma, and the idea of memory, the best place to begin was an old family photo album. I chose some old family photos (many with myself as a baby or a child) to use, to change, to reconstitute. Sometimes i could clearly see how I would alter the photographs in an oil painting rendering of them. Sometimes I would have to lay the photographs out and stare at them, walk away from them. I always tried not to go with my first impulse in how I would alter the work. I had to think about it, walk around with the idea, let it percolate to measure if it felt honest or contrived.
The memory and the truth I am exploring revolve around many themes: sin, inheritance, Aryan culture, sex, race, parenthood, marriage, abuse.
