bodies in motion

Herself Surprised

56” x 65”
oil on canvas
$5000

THE NARRATIVE OF DESIRE

Every human action is a complex, yet easily grasped, pattern depicting a hierarchy of movement relationships – a hand moving more freely than an elbow, an elbow more than a shoulder, a shoulder more than a hip. The information supplied to the eye can be transmitted by the slight adjustment of one image to the next.

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and the many works of Italian Futurists like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla are informed by a similar depiction of movement, speed, and intent. One of my primary goals in painting figures is to reveal the human narrative therein through a spare synthesis of images that depict the subtle movement pattern. The recurring subject of human sexuality is well suited to this inquiry because it displays a very wide array of human behavior. It is the ideal arena for combining physical movement and psychic intimacy, the explicit and implicit human behaviors of sex and love. These intertwining realms of activity are nothing less than humankind’s repudiation of its own mortality at the procreative and spiritual level – It’s how we show our contempt for the Grim Reaper. So too, art is a similar repudiation, a grasp at immortality at the creative level.