Category: Political Art

While listening to the dismal election news coming forth from my studio radio last week , I was busy at work on a drawing. The drawing was vague, more of an amusement than any specific concept. But as the electoral numbers came in, my panic rose, and the magnitude of what was at stake, all that I hold dear being seriously imperiled , the heretofore ambiguous drawing took a life of its own.

As the Bully rose in the number, my fears turned to those most vulnerable: women, POC , religious minorities, LGBTQ folk,  but most specifically the environment. If we were to being living in this profit-first-profit-only environment then kiss aside any slim progress made during the last few years. Good bye  Miami, hello hellacious droughts and rampant fires. Any sane regulation to protect our mute charges steam-rolled  by corporate greed and the rapacious machine of unregulated capitalism. All of those poor enslaved creatures in factory farms across the nation will be subject to the  same horrors found in the darkest most perverse Chinese market : animals skinned alive, brutally bludgeoned, callously scalded alive. A hell scene out of the imagination of Bosch, but the “sinners” are the innocent and the helpless.

My heart breaks at the potential exploitation of the earth and her children, all for some mad grasp at some lost imagined  American “greatness”.  So taking the advice of artists wiser than myself I channeled my nervousness and my anxiety into making this past week; this diptych one of the results.  I’m going to need to be hyper vigilant the next four years (gods forbid eight), and I expect my work will reflect the strange times we now live.  My colors for this drawing reflect my emotions, ugly, garish and harsh. By employing color wheel opposites  I tried to embody the split between Right and Left, the green and red expressing the tensions between the natural order and Man’s voluptuous greed. I have never employed such ugly coloring before and I doubt I will again. It has been too unsettling even working with them.

But then again, we live in unsettling times .