Skeletons (2017 - 2024)

There is nothing both as funny and as frightening as a skeleton.  It is just an immediate short hand for people, death, life, farce, drama and a million other things. 

José Guadalupe Posada has been a big influence on my work over the years, and also gothic & medieval art where skeletons appear frequently. 

I was also lucky to see the Memento Mori Pompeii mosaic in person a few years ago as part of the exhibition at the Legion of Honor in SF, a piece of art I had admired for many years.

"Skeleton Crew" below is a digital reply to the early acrylic painting "Dawn Chorus", both representing views out of my window, very much inspired by Posada and his prints. 

"Dawn Chorus" itself was a reply to the "East Dulwich" an earlier acrylic piece which was painted in London before I moved to the US, and was a Posada influenced take on my home surroundings at the time.

The "Bone Dry" & "Ocean Beach" pieces also continue this autobiographical theme.

The following three digital paintings are loosely based on the David Hockney POV photo collages, I wanted to emulate scenes similar to how the human eye sees.

They all feature the Rekhyt bird, or Lapwing, which was a symbol of the common people, or the working class, in Ancient Egypt.

"Feel it in your bones" is based in the Pig & Whistle, and English pub in SF.

I was experimenting with the idea of meticulous and repetitive texture in these paintings,  I had in mind the endless raking of lines into a Japanese Dry Garden, and indeed the process of adding so many fine marks was meditative in itself.

As mentioned earlier, the following ink and acrylic pieces are Posada inspired autobiographical works from when I was living in the Sunset district.

They were made with ink and watered down/washed out acrylic.

It's interesting seeing the red skies here, probably at the time I was thinking of the spectacular sunsets over Ocean Beach, but now I can't help but think of the day in late 2020, a year after these paintings were completed, when the sun didn't rise over SF and the air and sky was blood red and choked with smoke the entire day.