2004 - 2005

Whether intensely personal or broadly political (and often both), Picasso's painting is marked by a restless investigation of the possibilities of painting as a medium. To my mind, the inventiveness of his merging of the themes or subjects he is addressing with the way they are painted remains unparalleled: his paintings bear the weight of my repeated scrutiny because they never fail to inspire and stimulate my imagination.

In 2004, after visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, I became interested in exploring the parallels between Cubism, and its use of various, fragmented perspectives in the construction of a painting, and the kinds of fragmented perspectives and manipulation of the image facilitated by computer and digital technologies such as Photoshop. In fact, Photoshop, with its cutting, pasting and layering capacities, seemed to me to be the perfect contemporary Cubist tool. Starting with a series of drawings focusing on interactions between my wife (in the role of muse) and myself that ranged from confrontational and volatile to loving, I would then scan and import them into Photoshop. With Photoshop, I manipulated and superimposed the images, thereby creating a layering and fragmentation of the image, and then colored and distilled them into faceted shapes. The interaction between the linearized format and color blocks in these images seemed to me to represent a mutated Cubist/digital aesthetic. Finally, I translated the image to the canvas.

Throughout these paintings my dialogue with Picasso is important and obvious. It is a structuring dialogue on both a thematic and formal level: it shapes my investigation of the possibilities offered by a union of different forms of visual information, as well as the relationships between the individuals portrayed in the paintings. The issue of dialogue is further emphasized in the paintings in which I added speech bubbles (they also reference my interest in comics). Ultimately, the paintings are about the beautiful messiness of connection in both emotional and visual terms.

"The Conversation" Exhibited at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, 2005