FLOOD PAINTINGS LONGING FOR HOME

My work is about transforming the mistake . In my process I reuse old paintings, actively damaging the surface to give each a history, with my goal to reflect a less perfect yet more authentic concept of what is considered beautiful
"the Floating City" is a metaphor for the strong, hope-filled hearts of its residents."The Floating City" seeks to convey the weight of loss while offering hope that New Orleans will rebuild and triumph.

These paintings are the next evolution of my floodscape series inspired by Hurricane Katrina. My challenge has been to translate the sense of loss and disembodiement I experience viewing footage of the devastation using the language of paint--via composition, texture and color.. I employed a heavily worked and layered surface to convey a sense of each paintings history through a long process of distressing and aging the canvas; scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away to create surfaces which reveal shadows, faded colors, and echoes or ghosts of underlying imagery. This process creates surfaces in which most of the information is buried below layers of paint, visually communicating the concept of impermanence; the way memories appear only as glimpses in our consciousness, or fleeting emotional impressions.

By placing most of the information in the bottom quarter of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky, I allow the composition to reinforce a sense of our smallness against the bigness of nature. In some pieces I used multiple horizon lines, shifting the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected and re-reflected in the sky; a composition designed to reinforce a sense of physical displacement by dislocating the viewer from his normal frame of reference.

The flood evolved into a metaphor for displacement. A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first visual symbols a child draws. These naively rendered houses represent our memory of and longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols of home become more elongated, abstract, and totemic.

The emotional use of Color plays an important part in creating a mood. I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore. I have used color and composition very carefully to create mood and to evoke the desolate beauty of the evacuated Ninth Ward.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25532028@N02/sets/7215761212... (less info)