PATTERNS AND TONES

"Unhinged: Norma Desmond No. 1" 2017 After spending weeks looking at Trump's face, I needed a break. Yet while watching Billy Wilder's movie classic " Sunset Boulevard " once again, I saw the same patterns emerge from Gloria Swanson's character Norma Desmond. She contained the same narcissistic personality and delusional temperament that I see in Trump. Here was a fictional movie character from 75 years ago emulating the same traits displayed by the new President of the United States!  I suppose I'm fascinated with broken psyches. It's a car crash I can't quite look away from. Having been immersed for years observing homeless people on the streets of San Francisco to my curiosity with people who are hoarders, I always find myself wondering how each individual's mind began to unwind into a cocoon of self delusion and depravity.  We all have a our moments where we reach our tipping point but these...

"THIN LIPS SINK SHIPS - THE DONALD" 2017 Last week I was hit by a lighting bolt of inspiration during the middle of the night. For three hours straight images of The Donald flowed into my subconscious. I saw repetitive text scrawled across his face much like words on a chalkboard. The visuals were coming so fast no sooner would I write the ideas down, another batch of five images would bubble up waiting for me to sketch out and jot down in my notebook. In the morning I was tired but I was also determined to turn this waterfall of images into reality. "Thin Lips Sink Ships" are the 1st of 25 inspirations I was give during the night. My subconscious was obviously trying to work out my feelings about the political climate we find ourselves in today and had hit saturation level. This is new territory for me. I always subtly imbue my work with social commentary but this is blatant and bold. I am grateful to have tapped into my emergency valve to release the an...

" Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings "  Wassily Kandinsky Color. It's all around us. It has served our species well to understand and decipher the inviting shades and warning signs represented by color. Our perception of color is based not just on our visual interpretation and the juxtaposition of different colors together but our emotional and social cues we have attached to specific colors throughout our lifetimes. These social color codes are inherent in societies and helps to bind a culture together.  Color is allusive and fleeting. Like photography, it cannot exist without light. Like music, it is a universal language that can convey a multitude of feelings in a single instance. The subject of color is so vast and interesting that from time to time I will come back to color and explore its interrelationship with emotion, music, science, vision,  psychology,  culture and other elements th...

The Contortionist I feel at home in the world of archetypes and hidden messages. I love puzzles and late night Mystery Theater .  Perhaps this explains why I am drawn to and photograph certain motifs over and over again. Art from as early as 3,000 BC has been imbued with symbols and allegories that helped pass down stories and customs. Romans, as seen in my earlier blog "Of Gods and Goddesses" , perfected the use of secular allegorical symbols. And even during the height of the Renaissance through the 18th century, allegorical paintings were the modus operandi. Modern Art discarded the use of iconographic objects, except in the case of my very favorite periods of creativity: Dada, Cubism and Pop Art which employed the use of modern culture to stand in for the ancient symbols that had been utilized for centuries. The Clown As a photographer, amusement parks, circuses and local carnivals are such a hot bed of cultural archetypes, its hard not to captur...