Originally inspired by a pair of Edo-period Japanese screens depicting the Genpei Wars, my cutout battlescene paintings revolve around the desire to produce harmony within conflict. Costumed mounted warriors are set within natural elements (flowering trees, flocks of birds, wildfires) inspired by Asian landscapes. The paintings mix Western and Eastern pictorial conventions: Spatially, they are flattened in the style of traditional Japanese painting (in places descending into an almost purely abstract cacophany of shapes, patterns, and colors); simultaneously, they are punctuated by three-dimensionally rendered figures derived from the High Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods. Compositionally, they are controlled in the manner of Hard-Edge Abstraction yet also narrative-driven in the tradition of Persian pictorial art. The patterning on the costumes comes from far-ranging sources including Islamic architecture, Chinese lattices, Art Nouveau designs, and 1960s op-art geometries. Disparate in geography and time as these inspirations may be, they are all about, in some sense, how we attempt to create order in the face of chaos. By cutting the paintings out, I deprive the figures of a cohesive, perspective-oriented space in which to exist. This reinforces the hermetic nature of the spatial/compositional system and emphasizes the visual relationships between the figures and the natural elements in which they are placed.
Abstractly depicting the moment of contact on the battlefield, the paintings in the i, ro, ha, etc. series are based on Japanese crests designs. Historically, Japanese crests were used during peaceful times as ornamentation for the costumes of courtiers and were later appropriated by warriors to identify opposing factions on the battlefield. For these paintings, I overlapped several crests, painted in the areas of overlap, and erased the remainder of the designs to produce new geometric arrangements that combine disorder and structure in much the same fashion as the figurative works do. The titles of these paintings are based on Japanese kana syllabary.
Although they are also executed in gouache, I call the paintings in my third body of work drawings because they are more experimental in nature. The pieces in the drawing I section are mostly about trying to reconcile narrative and strict compositional structure. More conceptually based, the pieces in the drawing II section explore the intersections of different visual and linguistic communication systems.