TR's Thoughts
Every generation invents its own fantasy culture
The marvelous beauty and the temptation are always there, yet all of that does nothing but beg the bigger questions..
We live in a swirl of delicate gestures, driving desires, fantasy,
economic complexity and interdependence, isolation and hope.
The
kind of painting I do is often "looking", and one of the big
things I see when I am painting is how the image is always more than one
thing—the viscous, oleaginous colorful muck is also image, idea,
and metaphor. "Life" also has the same mutable variety of realities
and unrealities.
My paintings are large, complex designs that attempt to reflect
my sense of the times we are living in and both how richly interesting
they are and how difficult it is for most of us to navigate their uncharted
waters.
I am looking closely at who we are, the density of influences upon
us, the mistakes we make, and the recognitions that occur in trying to
navigate a universe with no sign posts.My paintings look at what we often don't want to see, literally
and metaphorically.
What drives so much of what we do is desire—desire of all
forms. Sexual, emotional, spiritual, for personal connection. And desire
is so easily transformed, sublimated, or warped. The bait of excitement
and desire is juxtaposed against the depiction of the boredom that seems
so present in our time.
In a way, I am looking at the lens through which we see each other—various
cultural aspects through which we think—or more accurately, fail
to think.
We may just be subjected to the myth-making machinery of our minds.
It may be that all societies inherently prescribe how we should interpret the world, and what we should do to achieve happiness.
Who’s benefiting by selling the myth?
We pursue the phantoms that we have invented.
We can't distinguish between meaning-making and myth-making.
And this is not to criticize the system of our illusionism. Living may simply be, for all societies, a huge and marvelous web of the real and the imagined.