THE COLLECTION
OF AVAILABLE
SERIES AND WORKS
Almost all of my artworks will be available for viewing here, under their respective series categories.
ACCESSING CONTENTS OF THE COLLECTION
To access the works in any of the following series, just click once on the desired series heading below, then you will soon be able to scroll the images in that series.
To return to this contents menu after viewing a series, click on the return button [ ] on the last image page within any series.
CRITICO (CUALQUIER COSA) SERIES
EL DESFILE PUERTORRIQUEÑO SERIES
HOMELAND INSECURITY -- THE INDIGENOUS AMERICANS SERIES
PROSECUTORIAL PORTRAITS SERIES
SHADOWS AND LIGHT/LIGHT AND SHADOWS SERIES
TITANS OF 20TH CENTURY MUSIC SERIES
ABSTRACTIONS SERIES
The following works partake of a Neo-Abstract Expressionist idiom to expand upon the “visual literature” of the genre.
I believe that images capture an experiential dimension that informs their relevance to the human experience.
As such, I personally have no need to assign untitled labels or bare numbers to identify any of my works.
Being communicative media, works of art require a felicitous, disturbing, enigmatic, or challenging engagement with their surroundings and/or with the viewer. The following abstractions represent this aesthetic and eschew being anonymous figurations that are separate and apart from what people know or can know or ponder.
__________
Whether figuratively or in the abstract, the achievement of asymmetrical balance delights the eye and the mind, whether as viewer or artisan. And as any artist can attest, achieving such dynamic equilibrium with disparate forms is challenge enough without also achieving the same with chromatic elements in the same concept.
To underscore the delicacy of this composition, I chose a palette of pastel colors not ordinarily combined to create an enticing complementary presence.
PASTELING IN FREE FORMS V3
(24 X 36" -- SCALABLE)
In the grip of a swirling juggernaut of a devastating worldwide pandemic, we all live anxiously in the shadows of uncertainty. The graphic depiction of emotional states is among the most elusive and challenging for any artist and is a test most often avoided, and understandably so. Yet it is the artist who is best suited to use his/her expressive techniques and talent to portray an amorphous menace. Here is my “essay” on the scourge of our times.
COVIDIAN WHIRLWIND III
(32 X 48" -- SCALABLE)
What will it feel like when it's over? Rather than dwell on the worldwide horror we are now experiencing, I'm looking to a future without the pandemic as a devastating daily reality. The global catastrophe of World War II lasted years, and its conclusion was a true cause for jubilation. And, like many around the world, I too want to feel the jubilation of finally being "in the clear." But can we really be in the clear without turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the other ongoing catastrophes and humanitarian crises around the world? In short, can we ever be "in the clear, at last"? Doesn't it depend upon how wide is the scope of our concerns?
IN THE CLEAR -- AT LAST?
(48 X36" -- SCALABLE)
In the venal corporate environment that we inhabit, there is one overriding imperative: that the operation, regardless of whatever else, show a substantial profit. Of course, there's an internal logic to the imperative, since every component of the operation is continuously monitored and measured by its cost, and, at the end of the consolidated accounting, there is always a "bottom line."
Perhaps too appealingly expressed, the following abstraction in form and structure distills the underlying essence of the imperative.
AHH, THAT BOTTOM LINE!
(42X30" -- SCALABLE)
Among other things, artists are forever obsessed with color, shapes, composition, asymmetry, and the prodding of consciousness. I sum it up this way.
AN ARTIST'S LIFE
(40X48" -- SCALABLE)
If the following visualization looks spooky to you, then mission accomplished. Actually, though not intended to scare anyone, this "friendly phantasm" is intended to make everyone reflect upon and let go of their imagined fears, hence the title.
WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?
(36X48" -- SCALABLE)
When it comes to abstraction, many artists seem to have a knack for translating the literal into the metaphorically ambiguous, or put another way, for engaging in the exercise of distilling subjective essence from objective substance.
DAPPLED FOREST
(36X56" -- SCALABLE)
Oftentimes, the magic of abstraction is the conversion of the ordinary into the extraordinary. Touchstones of everydayness can be epitomized as transcendent.
Jarringly or delightfully, we can move instantly from a densely opaque reality to the ethereal lightness of meta.
THE CAT AND THE FISHBOWL
(34X24" -- SCALABLE)
In general, modern abstract art has demonstrated how the expressive idiom of non-representational imagery has the capacity or can be used to symbolically summarize concepts not otherwise capable of figurative graphic representation. Robert Motherwell's "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" series comes to mind.
Of course, artists "speak" in terms of colors, shapes, proportions, textures, and the arrangement of elements in two, three, or four dimensions. In this way, they can encode/translate a literal "text" into an imagistic encryption that of necessity effectively turns the viewer into a "code hacker," so to speak.
These next works exemplify such imagistic encoding.
THE NEO-LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE
(36X48" -- SCALABLE)
THE NEO-CON MINDSCAPE 2.0
(36X48" -- SCALABLE)
TRIANGULATION
(30X48" -- SCALABLE)
GONE VIRAL
(36X40" --SCALABLE)
INCANDESCENT EARTH
(36X60" -- SCALABLE)
For the most part, we have not been raised to know and understand that we are all part of and inhabit a living ecosystem. Is it any wonder that we have adopted life styles that are a veritable disconnect, and a heedlessly destructive one at that? Is it a priority of our consciousness that many animal species are becoming extinct on "our watch"?
Do we need to be reminded of this? Indeed, we do, because just going along or normalizing ignorance is what complicity looks like. And that is no viable alternative for the ecosystem, now or for the future.
OCEANIC PROFUSION
(30X54" -- SCALABLE)
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ECSTACY
(24X20" -- SCALABLE)
ECSTACY TOO
(24X20")
It should not surprise that abstraction can result from extraction. The selection of elements or essences, if you will, is almost like scrabble tiles that can be used to form different words. We can disconnect them, shuffle them around, and explore the alternatives. The following ironic image and the enigmatic visualization below it were the result of such exploration.
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EMBRACEABLE YOU
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
SCULPTED GEMINI MIX
(30x36" -- SCALABLE)
In the realm of the abstract we can find just about anything, as many of my works and certainly the works of many others demonstrate. As each successive era develops its own inventions and vocabularies, the abstract mind can extract or imagine "what's new" in our world and express it as a digital design.
STREAMING VIDEO
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
IT IS SOMETIMES BLACK AND WHITE
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
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2 FOR T AND T FOR TWO
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
HIGH-RISE JITTERS
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
So much of art is imitative of natural phenomena. Homo faber often takes his/her cues from forms ready-made and seeks to make improvements and even abstract elaborations, Thus, homo faber can aspire to become homo creator. And, why not? Indeed, having created deities, why not continue creating?
ECHOICS
(24x36" - SCALABLE)
As noted elsewhere in this website, finding image B in image A is one of my fascinations. The following visualization is an apt example of finding abstraction through extraction.
FORMS IN FREE FALL
(48x30" -- SCALABLE)
It's a question without just a single answer-- talk about open-ended! Who is being asked, where, when, why, and under what circumstances? Is the context physical or metaphysical, terrestrial or cosmic, personal or impersonal, expected or unexpected, welcome or intrusive?
Imagery that poses a question seeks engagement with a viewer, an answer, if you will, and thereby "earns" whatever attention it gets.
WHAT'S UP?
(48x36" -- SCALABLE)
Either it has happened to us in real life or in our dreams, or we've felt it vicariously when it has happened to someone we know or know about, or even when we have seen it happen to some living creature. It is a primal, existential, gripping moment, which has prompted at least one philosopher/dramatist to write a play about it: the desperation and impotence of being trapped, with no way out.
CAUGHT, NO EXIT
(40x30" -- SCALABLE)
When famed American artist Robert Rauschenberg grew weary of the art scene in New York City, he permanently moved his home to a remote island in Florida, called Captiva, on the Gulf of Mexico, where he spent the last four decades of his life.
Among the 20 acres and several buildings he eventually acquired on Captiva was the 1942 structure known as the Fish House, built by the prize-winning editorial cartoonist and conservationist Jay Norwood (J.N. "Ding") Darling, who reportedly used it as a studio.
Rauschenberg died on Captiva in 2008 and his ashes were dispersed near the Fish House.
The impressionistic visualization below of a portion of this "found" structure is my graphic epitaph to this latter-day stellar exponent of found objects. The second image is an abstraction of an abstraction.
IMPRESSION: SUNSET AT THE FISH HOUSE
(24x40" - SCALABLE)
AT THE FISH HOUSE DETAIL
(25x50" - SCALABLE)
It would be such a simple world if "competing for the gold" were merely a matter of Olympic athletic prowess, instead of enterprise greed. This reminds us of the song from the musical "Cabaret": "Money Makes the World Go Around." But apart from the obnoxious and patently invidious jingoism of celebrating which country has the most medals, among the athletes there is a more personal appreciation and admiration of what it physically and emotionally takes for fellow competitors to earn a medal of recognition.
For this reason, "winners" and "losers" can give each other a "high five" as brothers and sisters in their respective contests of personal endurance and achievement.
The following abstract image celebrates that mutual spirit of sportsmanship.
HIGH FIVE FOR THE GOLD
(36x46" -- SCALABLE)
Language is our tool for attempting to communicate precisely with agreed upon symbols and meanings. And yet there is a realm in which words swim in ambiguity, even when tersely uttered, as the title of the following image demonstrates.
Can we agree on any one of several possible meanings? I doubt it.
And for this reason it "earns" its place as part of this Abstractions series.
I LOVE YOU PURPLE
(32x24" -- SCALABLE)
Originally, the phrase "less is more" was from a poem by Robert Browning, but it was adopted nearly a century later by Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a tenet of Minimalist design and architecture, and it aptly sums up the aesthetic of the spare, whether in form, color, or use of space.
The question of "what is enough?" is always a question of balance between too much and too little and is the crux of artistic choice and taste.
The following four minimalist abstractions are succinct examples of how I chose to answer that question.
CAN YOU SPARE A RAINBOW?
(30x45" - SCALABLE)
And, as we can see, "less is more" is still the case even if more than less.
STILL MINIMAL
(30x45" - SCALABLE)
Despite being the Spanish court's artist, and well-known as a great portratist during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes was also known for his depictions of grotesque characters and for recording the horrible. One of his famous and most heartrending canvases is "The Third of May," depicting the ruthless execution of the defenders of Madrid against the Napoleonic French invasion.
The contrasting opposition of lantern light and darkness, the bloodied heap of the slain, the unarmed pleading against a firing squad intent on cold-blooded murder, while those who would be next cower in dread, are a ghastly depiction of the brutality of armed conquest.
Although there may be no minimalist way of capturing the gruesome reality that Goya has, my chromatically muted and formally understated abstraction below is more an epitaph than a portrayal, hence my mention of Goya and my reference to the sinister Spanish phrase "Al Paredón" (against the wall) in its title -- which could easily have been the literal title for Goya's masterwork.
GOYA: AL PAREDÓN
(30x45" - SCALABLE)
In the mind of an artist, abstract imagery can be uninhibitedly promiscuous when it comes to concepts, freely "matching up" with whatever makes or doesn't make sense. But being tangible and fixed, such pairings are more than mere liaisons of the moment or "one-night stands."
SUPER HIGHWAY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT
(30x45" - SCALABLE)
As mentioned elsewhere on this site, my artistic process often begins with image A in my search for image B. We can think of it as a search for “a picture within a picture,” and “the find” can be as stunning as it is satisfying, either on first notice or after further processing, as was the case with the next four images below.
Also, as I’ve stated elsewhere, new meaning and conception can be found in a different and unrelated initial meaning as one plumbs the layers and levels of perception and significance.
EMERALD INFUSION
(22x36" - SCALABLE)
TIDAL ROLLS
(32x60" - SCALABLE)
Anyone familiar with Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" is aware that the static can inspire the dynamic. For sure, colors on canvas can trigger colors in music. But the reverse can also occur, as with the following abstraction, entitled "Fêtes," which "echoes" the colorful figurativeness and spaciousness of Debussy's eponymous second of three orchestral Nocturnes.
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FÊTES
(24x45" - SCALABLE)
The colors and sounds of night create a music of allure. It is almost like stepping into another dimension of sense and experience. And the colorful ribbons of daytime become luminescent playful bands of light.
The image below captures that magic after the sun sets.
EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK
(24x45" - SCALABLE)
Origins! We are such explorers of beginnings of things -- the underlying premise being that where something began will illuminate the present. But what if there is no beginning of everything, what if a beginningless past is the ultimate reality, then what? Can we live with that?
AND IN THE BEGINNING . . . ?
(30x48" -- SCALABLE)
Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" was published in 1920: "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice."
Slightly more than a century later, we can acknowledge that the ice caps are irretrievably liquifying, and numberless species are being erased. The landscape is changing/degrading before our eyes, and, like submissive lambs being shorn, we are acquiescing in our own collective holocaust.
AMERICAN CONSCIENCE SERIES
Throughout the history of the United States of America, there have been humanitarian individuals who have acted on their conscience and persisted, and have made a difference in the lives of many. These individuals must be remembered for their courage and commitment to the well-being of their fellow human beings, and this series commemorates such icons of conscience.
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Underscoring the political nexus between art and the culture and ethos of a society, the portraits constituting my “American Conscience” series present those persons of conscience in the history of the United States of America that I recognize have made exemplary humanitarian contributions for the greater good.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
(36x30" -- SCALABLE)
HARRIET TUBMAN
(36x32" -- SCALABLE)
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EMMA GOLDMAN
(30x36" -- SCALABLE)
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ROSA PARKS
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
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ALICE PAUL
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
IDA B. WELLS
(42x34" -- SCALABLE)
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ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN ("THE REBEL GIRL")
(32x24" -- SCALABLE)
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DOROTHY DAY
(36x33" -- SCALABLE)
HELEN KELLER -- THE EYES THAT SAW FEELINGLY
(24x32" - SCALABLE)
N.F.S.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
(24x32" -- SCALABLE)
REV. NORMAN THOMAS
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
EUGENE VICTOR DEBS
(30x40" -- SCALABLE)
DR. W.E.B. DU BOIS
(26x24" -- SCALABLE)
PAUL ROBESON -- WHEN ONE STANDS FOR THE MANY
(24x36" - SCALABLE)
N.F.S.
HOWARD ZINN
(32x30" -- SCALABLE)
I.F. STONE
(30x38" -- SCALABLE)
ANATOMICA SERIES
One of the perennially fascinating delights in all nature, recognized as such by artists almost everywhere, is the human body. Perhaps because it is the part of nature that is closest to us and that we know and enjoy most intimately that we have observed it and made it an object of replication and representation, both in reality and in fantasy, for millennia.
This series humorously indulges in framing the formal beauty of the human anatomy, hence its name "Anatomica."
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In the West, there are many who have seen a picture of Auguste Rodin's iconic image of "The Thinker" in that universally familiar sedentary posture. That cantilevered torso inclined forward, with elbow propped on a muscular thigh, is at once recognizable; but what may not be realized is that the entire body, every part of it, is in a flexed pose of meditative intensity.
I chose to focus on the sinuous legs to isolate the static yet powerful tension of Le Penseur's knees, sunlit against the clarity of an atypically cloudless Parisian sky.
But wait, . . . those knees are not the knees of a bronze statue!
THE THINKER'S PENSIVE KNEES
(22x20")
Andy Warhol did a varied series of works called "Camouflage." His fascination with the concept had to do with its plastic abstract content, which he enhanced through his choices of coloration.
By contrast, my fascination relates to how the definition of human musculature can suggest the uneven and, surely, biomorphic yet abstract configurations of camouflage-like patterns to adorn the body in a variety of poses and settings.
DESERT CAMOUFLAGE
(30x36")
IMPOSTURE IN BRONZE
(34x24" - SCALABLE)
MARINE CAMOUFLAGE
(30x36")
THAT FLEETING MOMENT
(34x24" - SCALABLE)
ART HEADS SERIES
Virtually every artist has a license to do things differently than others have done before. Yet there's a debt owed to the experiments and explorations of those others.
In this series, I seek to pay homage and tribute to those who have influenced my thinking and liberated my vision to go further. After all, art, like human consciousness, evolves and does not spring forth fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.
__________
Anyone who has visited the Louvre in Paris can recall seeing an iconic 20th-century landmark structure created by famed architect I.M. Pei. He left us recently, and I wanted to celebrate his imprint on our consciousness and human environment with the following commemorative poster.
IN MEMORIAM: I.M. PEI
(18x32")
Without question, Andy Warhol has had a transformational influence on 20th-century and contemporary art, as few others have.
Artists are forever "putting a frame" around what is all around us and in our mixed-up heads, and so, we end up noticing much more than would ordinarily be the case. The marriage of our subjectivity with an object makes it stand out, makes it meaningful, makes it an experience.
For me, the "pop" in Pop Art is onomatopoetic. It is a sound metaphor for impact. And this is what we sense when we engage with works in the genre.
The following composition is one in a series of appreciative tributes to Warhol.
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THANK YOU, ANDY
(24x24")
As a consummate "artiste-provocateur," Warhol struck a most responsive nerve as he playfully jarred and reoriented a culture's understanding of "what is art?" as well as what is the nature of the culture we live in day-to-day.
The following composition, entitled "Andy's Fan," boldly portrays Warhol's uniqueness as a disruptor of perceptions at the margins of popular/consumer culture and the art world.
ANDY'S FAN
(30x20")
Here's my double portrait of Warhol and his unique artistic collaborator of a few years Jean-Michel Basquiat. Through their eyes and explorations, we were taken into previously uncharted creation.
Warhol died in 1987 following complications of a gallbladder operation, and Basquiat died of a heroin overdose the following year.
THE EYES OF WARHOL AND BASQUIAT
(20x30")
Andy Warhol famously said that "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
It was one of those quirky, flippant declarations that caught people's attention. But when portrayed as a static image, fame can find itself frozen in time, as with a paused stopwatch.
Certainly, for Warhol, his 15 minutes have not yet expired, hence, the title of the following work, "Your 15 Minutes Aren't Up Yet."
I drew his eyes to capture his uncharacteristic surprise, but I left to the viewer's imagination what his expression might be.
YOUR 15 MINUTES AREN'T UP YET
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
Universally known for his deadpan stare, Warhol cultivated and fashioned his demeanor as much as he cultivated and fashioned whatever other parts of his malleable artistic presence and persona.
The stark spot-lit image below iconically captures that famous stare.
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HERE'S LOOKIN' AT YOU, KID!
(40x30")
We know he had "a thing" for stars ever since he was a child-collector of movie-stars' publicity/fan photos. Later, as an established artist, not only did he mix and mingle among many star celebrities of his day, but he created a body of work that placed an artistic spotlight on them, and on those who sought to mimic and pretend to be like them by having portraits made of themselves by the star portraitist of stars.
He also enjoyed being a star in his own right and even dressed up as such for his own amusement. As he once put it: "Fashion wasn't what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going." I think he would have enjoyed this spoofy, parodic visualization of his self-possessed singularity, echoing an earlier memorable parody of another artistically self-possessed prominent presence.
ANDY À LA MANIERE DE BALZAC DE RODIN -- A PRELIMINARY STUDY FOR A SCULPTURE
(60x36")
His creativity in drawing helped him make his mark in the product-related illustrative world of commercial art in the capital city of advertising: New York. This was long before making his own persona into an "illustrative product" in its own right.
Perhaps my ink-on-paper drawing below is what a street artist might have created upon catching Warhol at an earlier point in his flamboyant course toward stardom. The additional image/variation below it is perhaps what that same street artist might have elaborated back in his studio with more time and inspiration.
ANDY, PORTRAIT À MAIN LEVÉE
(24x20" -- SCALABLE)
ANDY, PORTRAIT À MAIN LEVÉE V1
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
We have seen how Andy Warhol's face has undergone various transformations over time, and this is most evident in the various photos capturing his look at different stages of his life.
Some years ago, it occurred to me that depicting him polychromatically in a manner similar to his multicolored approach to celebrity portraiture, but doing it while he was still a boy, would at least be a fun experiment. Ah, but how to do the master colorist justice?
ANDY BOY ALLA ANDY
(480x32" -- SCALABLE)
Anyone who has encountered and been "awakened" by the writings of German-Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse has no doubt gained a deeper understanding of his/her life and the lives of those around us. And to have "read him" has given us a precious sense of intimacy and insight into the thoughts and sensibilities of a deeply spiritual multi-dimensional consciousness.
Perhaps it is time to "re-visit" this authentic author of the soul.
AUTHOR OF THE SOUL
(40x30") SCALABLE
Readers of Rolling Stone magazine over the years have perhaps become devotées of the edgy artworks of well-known artist/caricaturist Philip Burke (who is also a longtime fellow Nichiren Shoshu practitioner). There clearly is a signature look to his caricatures of the "movers and shakers" in the arts and in politics that make his portraits iconic and unmistakable.
For those who don't know what he "looks like," I offer two views: my own caricature of the master caricaturist, and a Warholian polyptych portrait of the artist behind the many engaging faces.
ARE YOU A CARICATURE IN HIS EYES? -- CARICATURIST PHILIP BURKE
(24x20" -- SCALABLE)
THE FACE BEHIND THE MASKS
(24x30")
An artist's sensibility, what fascinates and engages and powers an artist's creative imagination, can become a proxy gateway for our own aesthetic literacy and growth. One might say that art is a society's acknowledgment of how artists can inform and enrich a culture. A culture grows in all dimensions of experience, and artists lead the way, as if they were our authorized guides and pathfinders. Aren't they?
Philadelphia-based fellow artist and true-Buddhist kindred spirit Quentin Morris has been providing such guidance by exploring a seemingly endless path in the form of what he calls "black paintings."
The following original composition is a digital photographic portrait collage incorporating diverse superimposed digital files, and I made it to commemorate my friend's 2019 one-man retrospective exhibition at the University of Alabama -- his first in the South, after five decades of creative output.
QUENTIN MORRIS'S EXPLORATIONS IN BLACK
(20x36")
Art, for the sheer beauty and joy of making it, is the real "Promethean Fire" that any artist brings to us. The inspirational muse is a "mother to us all" to the extent that, perhaps unaware of conception, we are born and reborn into new dimensions of perception. The French Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat did this for us with his innovatively-constructed pointillist works.
What conscious mind can fail to appreciate what Seurat conceived and brought to life in "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"? That visually calming tableau of a spring or summer day, portraying so peacefully a humanity leisurely at one with the moment, captures a peak aesthetic oneness and tranquility.
That Seurat masterpiece inspired the following work.
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UN SALUT À SEURAT
(40x40")
It is said that abstract expressionist sculptor David Smith was always thinking about sculpture. Indeed, the contours of such thought must be an abiding engagement with how to physically occupy or populate a void or empty space or natural landscape with an anthropomorphic concept in three dimensions.
Among sculptors, he is, for me, a standout. And though I am aware of nothing about him that was obnoxious or in-your-face, his distinctive and even overpowering works exhibit a compelling thoughtfulness and elemental refinement of conception that captivate and provoke fascination.
This is my tribute to that “sculpted” mind.
DAVID SMITH (ACETYLENE BLUE)
(30x40")
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Consider this: because we know that all things temporal are ephemeral and will someday come to an end, we can accept right now that what innovatively-inventive German artist Joseph Beuys presciently declared will one day be true.
2021 is the centennial year of his birth.
ART IN THE PASSAGE AND FLUX OF TIME
(26x40" - SCALABLE)
N.F.S.
THESE EYES HAVE SEEN THE ABYSS
(36x36" - SCALABLE)
N.F.S.
Sooner or later, every generation of visual artists becomes acquainted with the exquisite artistry of Rembrandt van Rijn. Although there is no shortage of artists whose mastery has been singularly outstanding, in Rembrandt we find such a breadth of masterful application that no one can deny his prominence as one of the greatest of the great that the world has ever seen.
Since perhaps no other portraitist has provided a more prolific chronicle of evolving self-portraits, I chose to "remaster" (update, as it were) one of them as my tribute to the great Dutch master.
REMASTERING RvR'S SELF-PORTRAIT
(28x40" - SCALABLE)
Michelangelo Buonarroti was known by the nickname "Il Divino" in his own time and even now, given the astonishing perfection of his works. He was indeed one of a few defining creative geniuses of the Italian High Renaissance and his most memorable and powerful works such as the David, the Vatican Pietà, Moses, and the many frescoes on the ceiling and one altar wall of the Sistine Chapel (to name only a few of his masterpieces) resonate with us to this day.
The visualization below, a study for an intended bronze sculpture, is based on a casting of Michelangelo's death mask. Why five heads? In how many arts did Il Divino excel?
BIOFORMS SERIES
The human figure is a sculptural yet pliable ensemble of dynamic or static postures and forms that can delight the eye, which, for example, may explain in part the virtually universal appeal of modern dance. At the very least, and in its barest presentation, there is an aesthetic allure that continues to fascinate when the human figure is seen as pure form.
This "BioForms" series is devoted to exploring that allure.
__________
The potential to give affront when it comes to depicting portions of the nude human body can not be a constraining concern for anyone with art enough to graphically extol the aesthetics of the bare human form.
The formal echoic nuances in this visualization below exemplify a continuing and evolving dialogue between the natural and the man-made.
PYGIDIUM
(24x36" - SCALABLE)
As with sex and text, we can always choose between the vulgar and the elegant when it comes to visual imagery of the nude form.
To my mind, artists are the pre-eminent curators, guardians, and exponents of the human form in all societies and for all generations, and my images in this series are my graphic affirmations of that reality.
PYGIDIUM II
(32x24" - SCALABLE)
The human body can be thought of as geometry personified, a complex geometry to be sure. The parabola, either by itself or as a fragment of a curvilinear shape, is perhaps the most analogous geometric form replicated in so many ways by the nude figure when viewed from various perspectives and poses. The following visualization epitomizes this, and the three views below it show the parabolic as an abstraction, as well as "in the flesh."
PARABOLAS
(20x16" - SCALABLE)
PARABOLAS II
(24x32" - SCALABLE)
PARABOLAS III
(20x16" - SCALABLE)
PARABOLAS IV
(18x36" - SCALABLE)
While the ancient Greeks supposed that a large round stone at Delphi marked the very center of the earth, like so many other mythologies, the Omphalos (as it was called) turned out not to be the case. Similarly, the human navel, while also named "omphalos," is also not the center point of the human anatomy, as most memorably confirmed by Leonardo DaVinci's famous pen-and-ink drawing of the "perfectly proportioned" Vitruvian Man.
Nevertheless, there's something magnetic about the human omphalos that attracts attention, even though it is, in reality, only an impenetrable, dead-end orifice and, with different individuals, is sometimes found "stopped up" or alternatively agape or demurely semi-open.
In deference to its sculptural appeal, here are three "bas relief"-like colorful renditions of this anatomical curiosity, plus a fourth mezzotinted view in an unconventional, suggestively-intimate juxtaposition. A fifth visualization challenges us to face a bold "trinity" of "buttons."
OMPHALOS I -- BAS RELIEF
(30x48" - SCALABLE)
OMPHALOS II -- BAS RELIEF
(30x48" - SCALABLE)
OMPHALOS III -- BAS RELIEF
(30x48" - SCALABLE)
OMPHALOS -- COUPLED INTIMACY
(24x32" - SCALABLE)
BLACK & WHITE SERIES
While failed encounters of the racist kind remain a hallmark of American life, I would like to believe that a parallel reality is that many, perhaps most, Americans have rejected and overcome the mental shackle of bigotry in their day-to-day dealings with their fellow citizens.
It was a welcome sight in 2020 to see the spurious "heroic" icons of asinine Confederate bigotry pulled down in many cities across the land. The repudiation of a murderously racist insurrection and its leaders was due very long ago. Gone may be some ignoble statues and monuments, but the psychological landscape too needs to be purged of misbegotten yet ingrained supremacist beliefs and attitudes that haunt the American psyche like atavistic ghosts
__________
The great humanist, scholar, and activist, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, began his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, by boldly declaring that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." But the twin realities of racial prejudice and discrimination, whether as the result of ethnic, racial, tribal, or national supremacy, have been abiding global inhumanities in the history of humanity for many more centuries than the Twentieth.
And, indeed, that the cry of "Black Lives Matter" has to be heard even in the Twenty-First Century is a testament to the perniciously persistent legacy of bigotry and prejudice that has stained and twisted the consciousness of uncounted millions, both here and abroad.
THE PROBLEM IN ANY CENTURY IS THE ENDURING PROBLEM OF THE COLOR-LINE
(30x60" - SCALABLE)
Indeed, the color line is the "great mental divide" showing us where ignorance persists between groups of people. That fundamental divide has many manifestations of increasing convolution and subtlety, yet, at bottom, it is all the same when stripped of its twists and turns, as the following sequence of four of six visualizations symbolize.
THE DIVIDE VI
(38x60" - SCALABLE)
THE DIVIDE IV
(38x60" - SCALABLE)
THE DIVIDE II
(38x60" - SCALABLE)
THE DIVIDE
(38x60" - SCALABLE)
Separatism is spawned in a mental ghetto. When coupled with the experience of living in an enclave neighborhood, it forms the virtual wall of separation that plays out in daily life. No doubt, the insular mind is a cheated mind that suffers from the partiality and distortion of ignorance.
We can pity the ignorant but must be wary of their ignorance for out of it emanates the miasmal stench of separatism and worse.
We must remain aware that actual separation is only a matter of degrees, and not a difference in kind.
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
(38x60" - SCALABLE)
For those of us without the "original sin" of bigotry (or for those who have overcome it), the challenge before us is the question "quo vadis" ("where are you going"); it is the test of how to proceed in society and interpersonally as a worthy example for others.
Racial equality (as with ethnic equality) can be a goal in the future or a state of mind in the present. In either case, the visualization below significantly asks: "now what?" (or stated differently, "where do we go from here?").
CELEB-ART SERIES
This series is a collection of portraits of the famous and not so famous personalities that have occupied the landscape of our life. Their images constitute a mosaic of what fame looks like from the surface of things. After all, fame is nothing if not a fickle and glorified superficiality of the moment or of the times.
__________
Norma Jean's Ecstacy Variations
My photographic mentor Philippe Halsman wrote of his photo visit with Marilyn Monroe his finding that "What impressed me in the living room was the obvious striving for self-improvement," referring to the photos, the books, and the barbells. And in his hit song "Goodbye, Norma Jean," Elton John wrote the popularly-resonant and haunting refrain, "I would have liked to know you, but I was just a kid. Your candle burned out long before the legend ever did."
So, as with many celebrity idols, we are left with fragments and frozen moments or film clips of a face many will recognize, but of a life largely unknown, obscured by what many may never know. And so, I have chosen to editorially cloak the mystique or enigma of her vaunted sensuous persona with a variety of hues and fanciful titles for an imagined "close-up moment" unseen by those who never knew her intimately. Here are two renderings of several.
ENDLESS ECSTACY
(20x24" -- SCALABLE)
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ECSTACY IN THE SUN
(20x24" -- SCALABLE)
YES, HER LIPS -- A Second Set of Variations
One may well ask how many generations must pass before the fascination with her lips becomes a quaint thing of the past. As a charter member of the generation after Warhol's, I, too, seem to be caught up with that famous pair of labia, and the following two further variations (of several) bear witness to that.
YES, HER LIPS (VARIATION 1)
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
YES, HER LIPS (VARIATION 5)
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
HER LIPS, TOO -- A Third Set of Variations
Every artist knows how one image can inspire or provoke others, and there is no reason why an artist should resist that temptation when each image can have its own power and presence to catch a viewer's attention.
Here are two versions of a third (poster-like) set of images, extending further the labial motif.
HER LIPS, TOO #4
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
HER LIPS, TOO #6
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
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WEEGEE IN SPIRIT
(24x24")
Eventually known as “Weegee,” Arthur Fellig became perhaps New York City's foremost free-lance press photographer, during the 1930s and ‘40s, and was well known for his daring depictions of life and death in the “Naked City.”
His spirit of dispassionately and unsentimentally recording for all to see what was sensationally there or what he uniquely captured made him, for me, not only an astute chronicler of everyday occurrences but also a sort of enterprising anthropologist of the streets.
Obviously self-aware of his position in the constellation of press photographers, he signed his photographs with a rubber stamp that read: “CREDIT PHOTO BY WEEGEE THE FAMOUS.”
My interpretative poster rendering below is more a character study of Weegee as a persevering artistic spirit who intently lived by his instincts.
It should not surprise anyone that a work of art can achieve "celebrity status." Whether it is "Starry Night" by van Gogh, Michelangelo's "David," Picasso's "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon," Monet's "Water Lillies," or certainly Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," each of these masterworks commands a mysterious popular appeal that has endured over time.
The earliest of these, the "Mona Lisa," dates back to 1503, just a year before Michelangelo's standing masterpiece, and has drawn my attention since my earliest childhood encounter with it as a picture postcard in grammar school. Decades later, a very patient wait in line at the Louvre finally brought me face-to-face with that most famous of painted faces.
Though mysterious enough by itself, that look by a rather plain-looking young woman (Lisa Gherardini) was something I could not resist intensifying to produce "my Mona" below.
MONA MIA
(44 x 20" -- SCALABLE)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was the originator and unsurpassed master Baroque sculptor of his age, let alone of any age thereafter. Although also known as a magnificent architect and painter, perhaps his single most popularly-recognized sculptural tour de force is "The Ecstacy of St. Teresa of Ávila."
His unmatched depiction and stunningly realistic sensuous portrayal of transported ecstacy in a religious figure is an awesome aesthetic and psychological achievement of singular artistic virtuosity.
Given this masterpiece's wide renown, I have included my tribute below as part of the Celeb-Art series.
ECSTACY TO THE THIRD POWER
(30x26" -- SCALABLE)
The year was 1957 when Columbia Records released the recording "Miles Ahead," a most fortuitous seminal collaboration between arranger Gil Evans and the jazz trumpet player, who would become my inspiration in taking up the trumpet as my instrument, Miles Davis. As a loyal devotee ever since of this unique musical explorer, I collected numerous vinyl recordings of Miles Davis's artistic trajectory as an ever-evolving contemporary musical presence.
But as happens with "stars in the constellation," this fan lived to see his favorite light flicker and dim for some time before Miles played his last note. Fortunately for us, his recorded legacy remains as alive and vibrant today as when it was produced, disc after disc, over the course of more than four decades.
My explicitly-transformative posthumous memorial tribute to Miles Davis below, on the thirtieth anniversary year of his passing in 1991, not only expresses my sense of loss of a personal musical hero, but also uniquely adds a new solemnly-respectful image of Miles Davis in death that is in marked contrast to the existing catalogue of various other commercial depictions of that magnetically attractive physiognomy while he lived.
Click on the following link to hear Miles in a superlative interpretation with Gil Evans of George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" classic: "My Man's Gone Now." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MUaf0pNNJ4
[Note: although this commemorative image is part of this Celeb-Art series, it is not available for private acquisition or commercial reproduction or use of any kind.]
CIRCULAR REASONING SERIES
As much as we may wish or work to go beyond our limitations to capture the totality of existence, we are forever trapped in a point of view or frame of mind.
This means that our perception is always and forever selective, circumscribed, and not comprehensive. In short, regardless of what is seen, something is always left out, something is always missing or unseen -- hence the allusive significance of the "missing" portions of the orbits or circumference in each panel of this series.
__________
What I call "Orbiter" is a set of four stylistically-minimalist panels within the theme of works called "Circular Reasoning." Conceptually, the Orbiter set is of particular interest to me not only because it was the initial imagery created in this series, but also because its design resonates so clearly with a tension between a flat two-dimensional image of space and a multi-dimensional reality that transcends the scope of our limited human perception or frames of reference.
Therefore, since metaphor is the language of artistic expression, the Orbiter set and the series of other Orbiter-derived images below represent a kind of metaphoric coming to terms or reconciliation with the ineluctable partiality or particularity of perceived reality.
Although there are three named "Orbiter" panels below, this Orbiter set is really a quadriptych that is “launched” (so to speak) by the event of perception itself that is suggested by a fourth panel (actually, the first in the sequence), entitled “Be Watching You,” a reference to a refrain in one of Sting's songs with the rock group The Police.
And because the set of four was conceived to represent the four dimensions of length, breadth, depth, and time, the panels enlarged are intended to be displayed either side-by-side, or, ideally, hung separately, over-sized, in a room with four otherwise-bare walls to create the experience of dimensionality.
ORBITER QUADRIPTYCH
Be Watching You, Orbiter 1, Orbiter 2, and Orbiter 3
(each canvas panel is 25 x 19" -- SCALABLE)
When Albert Einstein published his landmark theories of relativity in the early 1900s, his view of the universe reflected the prevailing scientific thinking at that time that the universe was static, even though his theory of relativity suggested otherwise. It took the telescopic observations of American astrophysicist Edwin Hubble, nearly a decade later, to show that the motions of galaxies everywhere he looked evidenced a "red shift" that proved that the galaxies were actually moving apart and away from ours, and that we live in a truly expanding universe.
The following visualization is one of two abstract works recognizing Hubble's contributions to our knowledge about the universe we live in.
HUBBLIAN RED
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
With regard to Hubble's findings, the related concepts of "dark matter" and "dark energy" have been generating much discussion, research, and theorizing in the astrophysics community, without any imminent resolution at this time.
One of those two concepts is portrayed below as a related variation of the Hubblian image above.
DARK ENERGY
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
In the spirit of art as a playing with possibilities, I recognize that the Pop Art movement of the mid-1950s through the 1970s spawned a more liberated and inclusive approach to visual literacy that continues to this day. The focus on familiar objects of everyday life, whether or not commercially produced, beneficially amplified the scope of what can command the attention of both visual artists and a viewing public, alike.
Here, the theme of “Circular Reasoning” not only re-presents curvilinear geometric forms as resonant familiar objects in themselves but also "frames" or contextualizes the imagery with titles in the vernacular language and phraseology of popular contemporary culture.
The following works exemplify this.
HERE COMES THE SUN
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
THE GREEN NEW DEAL
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
NEW YORK TOASTED BAGEL
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
Sayonara, Baby (variations)
One might say that variations on a theme are the way that artists playfully explore alternative versions of images. Van Gogh made many such explorations (or "repetitions," as he called them), such as that of the Postman Joseph Roulin or of Madame Augustine Roulin, and others. And, of course, the fascination with variation was famously explored and popularized by Warhol and firmly planted in the public consciousness of our contemporaries and popular culture.
In the hit film "Terminator 2," we hear Arnold Schwarzenegger use and repeat the expression "Hasta la vista, Baby," in different contexts and in that way it has become part of the world's lexicon of classic expressions. In a dubbed version of the film, the expression is changed to "Sayonara, Baby." I've chosen this alternative version as the title for a series of colorful variations in the "Circular Reasoning" series, and I leave to the viewer what to make of the graphic context in which the expression appears below.
SAYONARA, BABY v1
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
SAYONARA, BABY v7
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
The next work is an allusion to the spiritual in human existence.
True Buddhism (Nichiren Shoshu) posits that we have nine consciousnesses that are resident within us at all times. These consciousnesses or ways of perceiving and interacting with day-to-day living are operating simultaneously and color or inform our common mortal daily existence. The first six consciousnesses refer to sensations and data generated by our five senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste that are registered and organized in our sixth sense (or consciousness) of mind. The seventh consciousness is where non-sensory-dependent or abstract data are conceived, processed, and generated for our daily use, while the eighth consciousness is a karmic repository where all of the effects of all our causes made based on the other consciousnesses abide and reside as a dynamic interactive backdrop for the life conditions we manifest day-to-day and moment-to-moment.
As common-mortal/unenlightened beings, we find ourselves attached to, and are thereby confined by, our karmic eighth consciousness, and we manifest life conditions that vacillate continually among the other seven consciousnesses.
The ninth consciousness is a dimension of our being that can override and surpass the life conditions and influences of the eighth consciousness through a deep compassionate understanding and application of the Supreme Law of Cause and Effect in all aspects of our life. Living one's life from the perspective of the ninth consciousness, and chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo to the Gohonzon (the highest object of reverence and the embodiment of our founder and True Buddha Nichiren Daishonin's enlightened life condition) is what constitutes attaining enlightenment and one's highest and best life condition, one's best (i.e., true) self or what is referred to in True Buddhism as Buddhahood.
The aim of the True Buddhist practice of Nichiren Shoshu is for all human beings to become enlightened to their capacity to express their enlightened and compassionate self and thereby relocate their daily life condition so that it acts from and manifests the ninth consciousness.
Bearing in mind these understandings, the work below, whose subtextual significance is an allusion to the spiritual dimension taught by True Buddhism, is entitled "Toward the Ninth Consciousness." The ninth consciousness is metaphorically depicted as the incomplete (or as yet unrealized) light-purple circle, and the karmic eighth consciousness is the lighter-colored large barrier-like arc enclosing it.
TOWARD THE NINTH CONSCIOUSNESS
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
Though digitally created, a painterly aesthetic in rendering these "Circular Reasoning" works is intended to preserve the hand-made feel of the geometrical forms. This can most readily be noticed in what one might otherwise expect to see as perfectly delineated sharp-edged curves.
Note, however, that the following image, one of a related "trio" of "gray" visualizations, is an exception in this regard.
IT'S A GRAY AREA
(18x24" -- SCALABLE)
We know that not even airplanes travel in straight lines to reach their destinations. So, why is that not an analogous paradigm for our own journeys? Do we not circumnavigate our goals and destinations?
The dimension of time and all manner of obstacles that get in the way compel us to often "go around." Might not this image, then, be an apt winding/spiraling of our own progress toward whatever, wherever, whenever?
CRITICO (QUALQUIER COSA) SERIES
As the heading denotes, this is a series of critiques, specifically of conventional understandings or socio-political icons or historico-cultural mythologies that I regard as objects of demystification, satire, scorn, or derision in order to counter or diminish their spell.
__________
The significance of activist political messaging today is to manifest whether one is "woke" and to act accordingly -- that is, (as one definition has it) whether one is "aware of the injustice of the social system in which one lives" and is willing to "challenge problematic norms, systemic injustices and the overall status quo" of our surroundings.
The capacity to engage in critical thinking implicates an ability to be critically aware (which is to say, "distanced" from and not under the spell) of a prevailing social and political order. It also means not being in thrall to an establishment that operates as a pervasive and perverse controlling norm.
To the extent that our consciousness is not manipulated or submerged or immersed in or engulfed and conditioned by that norm is the measure of one's freedom to think outside the box of convention and to possibly become a messenger and agent of humanistic change.
So, the threshold question for each of us is: "are you woke," and, if not, what will it take for you to become woke?
WOKE
(30X30" -- SCALABLE)
The reverse side of the U.S. one-dollar bill shows the obverse side of the Great Seal of the United States of America, which contains an image of a flat-topped pyramid with a suspended radiant eye floating at the pyramid's apex. The eye is supposed to represent the all-seeing divine "Eye of Providence" below the arc-like Latin inscription "Annuit Coeptis," which has been translated to mean "He (God/Providence) has favored our undertakings."
But today, as in earlier times, many look askance at such a mythical notion, believing in neither the existence of an approving deity, nor that the often brutal, inhumane, and sanguineous history of the United States evidences undertakings morally worthy of such overall divine/"providential" approval.
Sharing such skepticism, I have taken that polemical "Eye of Providence" and depicted it as a satirical "trinity" of closed eyes, colorfully adorning Easter-egg-like ovals (another mythology) against an "Easter-pink" ground, as my playfully explicit negation of any such approval, whether divine or otherwise.
DEATH OF AN ARTIST SERIES
We can and do idly wonder and speculate on what a certain person or artist might have done or achieved had they not encountered an unnatural premature death. While we may have been left in the lurch with an artist’s incomplete creative output, we can still feel grateful for the truncated legacy “bequeathed” to us as a society and artist’s audience.
This series consists of abstract epitaphs to artists whose outstanding creativity was cut short by an untimely death.
__________
Abstract-expressionist innovator Jackson Pollock was only 44 years old when he died in a car accident on August 11, 1956.
J.P.'S EXIT
(40X30")
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D.S.'S EXIT
(50X40")
Constructivist welded-metal abstract-expressionist sculptor David Smith was 59 years old when he died in a car accident on May 23, 1965.
Neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988. He was 28 years old.
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J.M.B'S EXIT
(30X40")
The following image expresses what Basquiat never got to do.
JEAN-MICHEL'S FAREWELL
(30X36")
SAMO EST MORT
(48X60")
BASQUIAT'S DAIMON LIVES!
(48X60")
Post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh died of a gunshot wound on July 29, 1890. He was 37 years old and had only begun painting when he was 27.
VINCENT'S EXIT
(36X48")
Pop artist Andy Warhol died unexpectedly on February 22, 1987, from complications following a gallbladder operation. He was 58 years old.
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ANDY'S CHECKOUT
(36X48")
HIS SOUP GHOST HAUNTS US
(24X24")
Renaissance master painter and architect Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (simply known as “Raphael”) died suddenly and unexpectedly on April 6, 1520, after being given the wrong cure for a mysterious fever following a night of “excessive sex” with his mistress. He was 37 years old.
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RAFFAELLO'S ADDIO
(36X32")
French monumental canvas painter Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault, weakened by riding accidents and chronic tubercular infections, died on January 26, 1824, after a long period of suffering. He was 32 years old.
ADIEU, GÉRICAULT
(36X30")
Famed graffiti artist and social activist Keith Haring died of AIDS on February 16, 1990, at the age of 31.
HARING'S LEAVE-TAKING
(30X36")
Influential Armenian-American abstract-expressionist painter Arshile Gorky (Vosdanig Adoian) hanged himself in a shed on July 21, 1948. He was 44 (or 46?) at the time.
GORKY LEFT US HANGING . . .
(36X30")
TORMENTED SPIRIT: ARSHILE GORKY
(36X24")
On February 25, 1970, pioneer color-field abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko was found dead in his studio, his wrists slashed. He was 66 years old.
ROTHKO BLEED
(36X48")
The great French originator and exponent of pointillism Georges-Pierre Seurat died unexpectedly of diptheria on March 29, 1891. He was 31 years old.
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis on January 24, 1920 at age 35.
MODIGLIANI È FINITO
(40X32")
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MODIGLIANI NEVER LOOKED BETTER
(40X36")
French artist Jeanne Hébuterne, Amedeo Modigliani’s young common-law wife, threw herself out of her family’s fifth-floor apartment window on January 26, 1920, two days after Modigliani's death, killing herself and her unborn second child. She was 21 years old.
JEANNE'S FAREWELL
(40X30")
The profoundly influential Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known for his dramatic signature chiaroscuro portrayals, died from unascertained causes on July 18, 1610, at the age of 38.
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L'USCITA DI CARAVAGGIO
(34x30" - SCALABLE)
On October 28, 1918, Viennese painter Egon Schiele died only three days after his wife, Edith, who was six months pregnant, succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic that claimed more than 20 million lives in Europe. He was 28 years old.
DIGITAL COLLAGE SERIES
Daily life is an impermanent collage that most of us take for granted -- after all, the changing scene is what we experience daily. But when we make the collage permanent, it's art -- or, admittedly, someone's idea of art.
This series celebrates the creative reconfiguration and transformation of digital imagery in order to enrich our visual and conceptual experience of daily life.
__________
Although summertime is nothing if not the quintessential efflorescence of colors, curiously, it often paradoxically becomes a filtered tinted experience, as the ludic, parodic collage below illustrates.
SHADES OF COLOR -- SUMMERTIME
(48X60")
The famed French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, became known for capturing precisely-timed life moments at their optimal expressive maturity. He coined the expression "the decisive moment" to describe this genre of candid photographic image-making in which perception and the moment are merged with the click of a shutter.
In decision-making, all of us are more or less aware of a "right moment" to do or say, or not do or say, one thing or another. Sometimes we catch the moment or miss it, and we feel and respond so differently in either case. Of course, there's nothing inherently good or bad in catching or missing per se since it all depends on what's at stake, and whether catching or missing can lead to regret or fulfillment.
LIGHTS AT THE CROSSROADS: CAUTION, STOP, GO
(40X72")
My "West Side Story" began in the immediate aftermath of World War II on a lower-working-class street block in mid-Manhattan. In fact, it was the very street and block where the movie "West Side Story" was filmed. There, I learned from my non-Hispanic "peers" the meaning of brutally-painful ethnic animus at the end of their fists. It was literally pounded into me as a five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking child. Of course, it was all so overwhelming and incomprehensible to me because I did not yet realize then that their assaults were the result of their malformed consciousness, their ignorance, and their home-grown conditioning in bigotry. My unspoken question then was only "Why did the boys in the 'neighborhood' who were total strangers to me turn me into their punching bag?"
Later on in life, as a survivor, I felt very glad that they never allowed me to become "one of them." And that has made all the difference in so many ways.
The autobiographical collage below depicts my early-childhood encounter with ethnic bigotry and the failure of society's adults to deal with, let alone prevent, it.
POW -- YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!
(42x60" - SCALABLE)
Although Michelangelo Buonarroti never married, he maintained a close and deep (it is said "platonic") relationship with the widowed noblewoman Vittoria Colonna, who was also known as a poet in her own right. Seventeen years her senior, he once called her "the soul and the heart of my fragile life." Interestingly, he never painted her portrait, instead leaving us only a rough sketch. What kept him from capturing her, either in the flesh or in spirit, during or after their dozen-year friendship?
Details of his sketch and painted portraits by Girolamo Muziano and Sebastiano Luciani provided the source material for this digital collage.
EL DESFILE PUERTORRIQUEÑO SERIES
El Desfile Puertorriqueño -- ¡Qué Bonita Bandera!
Ever since I was a child, I was always impressed by the unusually strong affection of my Puerto Rican people for their small and troubled island. My grandfather was not only a lifelong member of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), but he was also elected in the early '50s to the island's legislature as a PIP representative from El Barrio Obrero, a lower working-class community in Santurce, near San Juan.
Each year, we can see the kind of enthusiasm and pride abundantly shown below by native-born Puerto Ricans and their New-York-born relatives and descendants when the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue takes its place among various other celebrations of national pride and cultural identity.
Having marched in "El Desfile," I have had the privilege of photographing participants and crowds of onlookers along the parade route.
This print portfolio of joyous poster images is my heartfelt tribute to all involved.
¡Qué Viva Puerto Rico!
__________
MI HIJO, ASí SE LLEVA MI BANDERA
(MY SON, THIS IS HOW TO CARRY MY FLAG)
(36X48")
NO IDENTITY CRISIS ON THIS CORNER
(30X40")
¡QUÉ VIVA PUERTO RICO!
(LONG LIVE PUERTO RICO!)
(36X24")
RATIONAL EXUBERANCE
(24X36")
NOT SALSA, BUT
RIO PIEDRAS ON ROLLER BLADES
(36X24")
STANDARD BEARER AND SON
(36X24")
EL TRIO LOS TRES BRONXEROS
(48X36")
FLAGS AND BANNERS
(24X36")
AND THIS IS WHO WE ARE --
NOT A MASCARADE, BUT A PARADE!
(36X24")
PROUD STRUTTIN'
(36X24")
MS. TEENAGE PUERTO RICO!
(36X24")
BOUNDLESS JOY ON A SPECIAL DAY
(24X36")
BANDERA "CHIC"
(40X30")
COLOR GUARD
(40X30")
THE REAL MR. BANDERAS
(36X24")
UNDER THE SHADE OF THE BIG FLAG
(36X24")
ÉTUDES EN FORM SERIES
The human form, like other objects, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and is perhaps even more engaging due to its inseparably erotic suggestiveness.
The free-hand/free-form imagery in this series explores dynamic contrasts seen only in one's imagination and roughly approximated digitally in two dimensions. The energy and tensions of such iconography reveal a mind at play.
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[NOTE: FOR THE MOST RECENT WORKS IN THIS SERIES, GO TO THE "LATEST ARTWORKS" PAGE.]
GEOMETRICS SERIES
Admittedly, there are times when a composition results from a serendipitous discovery -- from a glimpse or momentary flash of awareness that something can become an artifact. But whether it is an intended or unintended juxtaposition or a chance inspiration, it is certainly only the artist who will then endeavor to make the connection between chance or intention and its realization so that others too may see.
The theme of GeoMetrics grew out of such a fortuitous discovery, in particular with respect to lines.
The manifold expressiveness of the line continues to bewitch and bedazzle, regardless of what has gone before. In fact, is the line not a pregnant metaphor for the infinite -- for, distance forward in time and distance backward in time have no absolute beginning or end, as with a circle or oval that is a line visibly and infinitely continuous?
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As embodied by the visualizations below, we can appreciate how lines create and define order within an amorphous or otherwise indefinite space. There is something ineffably rational about the line in the midst of chaos or the indistinct.
The following visualization entitled "Ultraviolet II" can be thought of as a convenient segue between the Circular Reasoning and this GeoMetrics series. Its suggestive graphic implications have, in fact, generated several of the images below it with their distinctively "meaningful" titles.
ULTRAVIOLET II
(24x36" -- SCALABLE)
In the True Buddhism of Nichiren Shoshu, we are encouraged to always choose "the middle way" (chudo) in all matters of daily life, despite the intensity of the so-called "Eight Winds" (that is: prosperity, decline, praise, censure, honor, disgrace, pleasure, and suffering) that may "blow" to throw us off course or knock us off our feet. We can sense that resolve to hew to the middle way in the next visualization, entitled "Chudo."
CHUDO: THE MIDDLE WAY
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
To those who have encountered and held dear Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet," the next work may have particular resonance, especially for those who have been or may still be in lasting relationships. "And stand together, yet not too near together; for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."
FOR THE PILLARS OF THE TEMPLE STAND APART
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
We've all done it at some point or another, and may even still be doing it. But the Supreme Law of Cause and Effect is unavoidably there to confront us with the effects of the causes we make. The following image is a visible reminder that we make a cause when we "cut a corner."
CUTTING CORNERS
(30x20" -- SCALABLE)
What potential remains obscure and to be discovered in the apparent? It is a question that is more a mindset of discovery than an occasional query, and reflects an awareness that there is always something more. In perception, one can think of it as the difference between what is in plain sight and what is latent.
In the digital dimension, the pixilation of objects when viewed digitally can result in the equivalent of what we sometimes see when it comes to the interfacing of optics. In "Newtonian Solution," I use the digital equivalent of Newton's rings to reveal a hidden logic.
NEWTONIAN SOLUTION
(30x48" -- SCALABLE)
The coming together of concept and image is one of the joyous fortuities for those who create visual artifacts. The following four vibrant coloristic variations on the fanciful theme "Even A Rainbow Can Make Its Point" express and explore that joy.
EVEN A RAINBOW CAN MAKE ITS POINT #1
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
EVEN A RAINBOW CAN MAKE ITS POINT #2
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
EVEN A RAINBOW CAN MAKE ITS POINT #3
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
EVEN A RAINBOW CAN MAKE ITS POINT #4
(24x24" -- SCALABLE)
Going beyond the confines of a single canvas has been a challenge or necessity often overcome down through the centuries. And although a single canvas has more often than not been the vehicle for conveying an artist's complete intent without need for further amplification, something special can result when individual canvases, sufficient by themselves, are then juxtaposed to form an even larger, more intriguing whole.
The following "Luck of the Draw" set is a triptych best displayed unframed and side-by-side about 2 inches apart to achieve its full geometric effect.
LUCK OF THE DRAW SET (V1, 2, 3)
(each canvas panel is 36x24" -- SCALABLE)
Piet Mondrian's legacy is synonymous with the geometrics of color. The early Twentieth-century Dutch aesthetic movement De Stijl (which he co-founded) extended and popularized Mondrian's immortal chromatic geometries as well as the similar explorations of other Dutch artists in art, architecture, interior design, clothing, and furniture design.
But although he was one of the great innovative artists and theoreticians of his time, it remains one of the poignant ironies of iconic image-making that Mondrian died in poverty, despite his signature contributions to our visual world.
The following images are three of a set of thirteen variations entitled "Homage to Mondrian" (or "Variations: Large, Medium, and Small").
HOMAGE À MONDRIAN
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
HOMAGE À MONDRIAN VII
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
HOMAGE À MONDRIAN VI
(40x30" - SCALABLE)
While it may be true that we can do things to improve our memory, it yet remains a fact that we forget more than what we have learned. Despite our valiant, though futile, efforts to remember and preserve for ready access and/or future reference, so much seeps into amnesia.
The following set of four paintings, for me, captures metaphorically the almost Sisyphean challenge of trying not to forget. You can test this for yourself by looking carefully at these four images, then closing your eyes and trying to recreate them in your mind's eye.
NON DIMENTICAR NO. 1
(30x60" - SCALABLE)
NON DIMENTICAR NO. 2
(30x60" - SCALABLE)
NON DIMENTICAR NO. 3
(30x60" - SCALABLE)
GLOBAL CONSCIENCE SERIES
The following images comprise the series entitled "Global Conscience." They underscore that our world is our "true nation" and that geopolitical boundaries ought not define the limits of our responsibility and compassion for our fellow human beings.
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How Will The Eyes Of Children Judge Us?
How adults create an environment for the children of today to grow up in is a most profound and serious responsibility. We are more than mere inhabitants of the planet. We are also the guardians and custodians of the future by the conditions we set in motion today. As adults, each of us must ask ourselves, "what am I doing to make the world a better place." We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the children.
HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #1
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
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HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #2
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #3
(20x18" -- SCALABLE)
HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #4
(36x32" -- SCALABLE)
HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #5
(32x36" -- SCALABLE)
HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #6
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
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HOW WILL THE EYES OF CHILDREN JUDGE US? #7
(26x30" -- SCALABLE)
GROTESQUES SERIES
[WORK IN PROGRESS]
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[NOTE: FOR THE MOST RECENT WORKS IN THIS SERIES, GO TO THE "LATEST ARTWORKS" PAGE.]
HOLOCAUSTS SERIES
Down through the centuries, the world's eyes have seen the atrocities of extermination and genocide of various populations and indigenous peoples. So, no one people, anywhere or at any time, can exclusively claim or own the concept of a "holocaust," when history clearly shows that effectively the same or similar kinds of barbarity have been deliberately and murderously inflicted upon various groups, populations, and nationalities, not only simultaneously or at different times, but even by the same or different perpetrator nations.
Indeed, the last century also showed us that what Imperial Japan did in China, even before the Third Reich was established, was no less a holocaust to the Chinese victims of that genocidal atrocity. Moreover, what do we call the dropping of two atomic bombs on two cities densely inhabited by civilian noncombatant men, women, and children if not the perpetration of atomic holocausts, let alone atrocious crimes against humanity?
And, near the end of the last century, what of the inhuman ethnic and genocidal outrages that occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda, were they no less crimes against humanity and holocausts in their own right?
And still today, what we see in northeast China, in Myanmar, and in the Middle East are indeed holocausts to the victimized there, just as to other victimized civilian peoples elsewhere today around the world.
This series is a reminder to all that holocausts have occurred and are still occurring, even in the midst of a worldwide killer pandemic, and that empathy for the preciousness and suffering of others is the true measure of one's humanity.
[Note: All visualizations in this series are intended only for exhibition in public institutional spaces and are not available for private ownership or display.]
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Every holocaust perpetrates the vicious penetration and defilement of human vulnerability. Whether instantaneously or gradually over time, a unilaterally oppressive life-extinguishing force destroys an animate preciousness that it is incapable of creating.
The madness of Thanatos unleashed knows no quarter. Its devastating impetus is designed to crush all opposition and resistance. How many times have we seen or been touched by it? There are always those who experience it first hand, and those who only hear about it from others. It is either exploding in our faces or rending our hearts.
But, don't we realize that those hands against the wall are, each and every time, always our hands?
HANDS AGAINST THE WALL
(26x60" -- SCALABLE
"For whom the bell tolls" is the archetypal phrase recalling our common humanity without distinctions. And yet the world seems to have a built-in delay mechanism in its acknowledgment of violations of such common humanity that, over and over again, allows and gives time to the violators to wreak their horrors on their victims.
In the end, pillars and tablets of mute remembrance populate fields of nature, as if somehow those geometric stone markers were sufficient and fitting acknowledgments (expiations?) by the world that grievous wrongs against innocents were committed and were allowed.
THE GEOMETRY OF GENOCIDE -- AFTER THE WORLD AWAKENS
(24x60" -- SCALABLE
They look expectantly at us, truly giving us an anxious "parting look," as if to say "Now, don't you forget us!"
No, how can we forget you who disappeared in ashes and smoke, a horrible ending of lives taken before their time!
DON'T FORGET US!
(18x36" -- SCALABLE
These Armenian orphans were the "children" of the genocidal campaign that was waged by the Ottoman regime against the Christian Armenian population living under its control near the early part of the last century. Orphans, refugees, and broken bodies -- those are always the foreseeable "progeny" of crimes against humanity.
THE CHILDREN OF GENOCIDE
(24x36" -- SCALABLE
Do not speak to us of honor, freedom, and peace in the conduct of war -- you cannot place garlands on the beast of calamitous mayhem. Uniforms, medals, and tributes mean nothing more than the ashes of death and destruction cast to the wind.
War is the unleashing of cravenly criminal instincts against the defenseless.
COURAGE, HONOR, AND BRAVERY "IMMEASURABLE" -- BUSHIDO NO MORE!
(22x30" -- SCALABLE
Every war is a holocaust. America's longest war, before the protracted fiasco in Afghanistan, was Vietnam. It was a might-makes-right delusion, under five presidential administrations, unparalleled before then in its enormity and folly, that began to open the eyes of Americans to how their government's mendacity and propaganda led to the needless slaughter of innocents and the gullible in a distant Asian land that is today just another U.S. trading partner, regardless of the politics.
Racist genocidal atrocities were committed with impunity in Vietnam and the "perpetrators-in-chief," with the exception of J.F.K., died in their beds as free men.
HOMELAND INSECURITY -- THE INDIGENOUS AMERICANS SERIES
The history is abundant and clear that the first homeland terrorist attacks against Indigenous peoples on what is now known as the United States of America were perpetrated by Europeans, beginning in the 15th century, and the terror continued for another four centuries at the hands of their descendants and by later White colonizers and settlers from various other nations of the world.
Indeed, it is one of the greatest dark ironies in history that at the same time that some of the greatest aesthetic and philosophical achievements were occurring in Europe, the most grotesquely barbaric and genocidal carnage was being carried out against indigenous people of color on their own homeland in the "New World" by colonial militias and military forces.
This series is a tribute to the Indigenous People of North America and to their leaders and many others who rose up to defend their homeland, their communities, and way of life against overwhelming terrorism never before seen in the Western Hemisphere.
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In their richly symbolic culture, the colors used by Indigenous Americans were not merely casually decorative or cosmetic but had significant meanings. So, as one "reads" the following tribute to three of the most important chieftains of the 19th and early 20th centuries, one should understand that the color orange signified intellect and determination, and a willingness to fight to the death. Purple was a most sacred color and symbolized power, mystery, and magic. And white signified sharing, purity, and light, as well as the color of mourning.
The "color-coded" images that follow are the first to be included in this series.
TOTEMIC GUARDIANS
(48x40" - SCALABLE)
In the chromatic lexicon of Indigenous North Americans, the meanings of colors would take on different "shades" depending on whether application was that of face paint or war paint. In the case of green, its significance denoted endurance if used in combat. Otherwise, it was the color of nature, harmony and healing. To my mind, this hauntingly evocative "Mona Lisa" below seems to combine all meanings simultaneously.
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NATURE, HARMONY, HEALING, ENDURANCE
(18x16" - SCALABLE)
Although red can signify blood, violence, and energy when used as war paint, it also has the antipodal noncombative significance of faith, beauty, and happiness. And what could more perfectly embody the non-belligerence of the latter than the soothingly tranquil image below of a young madonna and child?
FAITH, BEAUTY, AND HAPPINESS
(16x20" - SCALABLE)
Blue is the color of wisdom and intuition, as well as of a warrior's confidence. Cheyenne Chief Wolf Robe was most notably known for having been awarded a Peace Medal by President Benjamin Harrison.
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IMPRESSIONS SERIES
Our memories are a private catalogue of our life’s impressions. And, especially, when abroad, one encounters oneself as a kind of extended being, who once was there, somewhere, only to be remembered.
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NOONTIDE AT STONEHENGE
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
IN FLIGHT AT ST. MARK'S -- IMPRESSION AT DAWN
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
Ezra Pound's archetypal imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro," suggested the title for this stark visualization. The poem's haiku-like stripped-down spareness is evidently mirrored in this "pithy" visual.
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
(30x20" -- SCALABLE)
Realities can become emblematic, especially when armed with a camera under the right circumstances. Willfully stranded on "an island" between two seemingly unending streams of light on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, I was one with the frenetic restlessness of a Paris cloaked with night.
THE ARC TO AND FRO
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
From this angle, this signature Parisian landmark never looked more intriguing.
LIFE SCENES SERIES
The "daily show of life" in a densely populated environment like New York City is our pre-technological streaming video. In these times, almost anyone can record and freeze the stream for later viewing and sharing. This series picks out the meaningful and noteworthy from the torrent of images we "swim in."
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What we can see around us often competes with what we can imagine. And although beauty can reside in the eye of the beholder, so too can pathos.
Of course, we are at liberty to project onto what we see whichever characterization we are inclined to choose. And that potential is certainly what any of us can experience when viewing my “Young Mother and Child” below, which is my initial image in this series of “Life Scenes.”
To my eyes, there is beauty in the tranquil stoic commitment and fortitude of this youthful parent.
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YOUNG MOTHER AND CHILD
(48X30" -- SCALABLE)
Inadvertent juxtapositions of objects or of people with objects in their environment are one of the most common ironies we can see. In this obsessive age of messaging, it often seems as if chance itself were creating random messaging for the attentive viewer.
Capturing that messaging to share with others is not always easily accomplished. In an environment filled to capacity with volatile beings, there can be risk and the possibility of an abrupt irrational confrontation. And because many of us are aware that an attempt to harmlessly capture what may appear amusing and inoffensive can trigger an unwanted and unwelcome response, we often forgo the "capture." Indeed, one records at one’s peril.
I took a chance inspired by chance, and now you have the chance to see the amusing in the ordinary. I call this visualization “Unposed But Juxtaposed.”
UNPOSED BUT JUXTAPOSED
(48X30" -- SCALABLE)
There are many ways in which generations interface and differentiate – perhaps most emphatically is in choice of footwear.
We might think of it as a clash of aesthetics, or even as a defiant statement of values. But most certainly, what it is is a choice of lifestyles in transitional coexistence, in no way antagonistic and simply anonymous in juxtaposition.
GENERATION GAP
(42X24" -- SCALABLE)
Daily life can provide us with countless arresting moments, but not all of them are publicly seen and for that reason are not recordable. Yet they too are part of the mosaic of daily human existence, but on a private scale.
The interpersonal domestic dynamic presented below arises from an imaginary encounter, which, though not actually witnessed, may yet be as authentic a portrayal of reality as any publicly experienced. Given its truthfulness within the context of the nuclear family, I published it years ago on social media as an originally-drawn pen-and-ink (and digitally enhanced) political poster. It captures the stunned perplexity and embarrassment of adults caught short when provoked and prodded to personal consciousness and public engagement.
LOST AND FOUND SERIES
Every day, we walk or pass by what deserves a second look. And when we take that second look, we notice something more or even something else.
All of the following images were perceived one way at first sight, but were then “reconceived” from another point of view upon re-examination.
How would our mindscape be different (and better) if we all tried doing this to discover what “hidden treasure” we find?
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Fantasy imbues the mundane with imagination. And, transforming one reality into another is the alchemy of creativity.
Quite effectively, then, we can transport with a hint or a suggestion. Thus, we journey with the plausible or fanciful, and thereby transcend.
MICROCOSMIC FANTASY
(30x30" -- SCALABLE)
Fortuity is often available to any artist as a resource and inspiration. One thing, object, or image can trigger a cascade of creative ideas and effects. This is somewhat analogous to the stimulus of the famed madeleine in volume one of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" ("À la recherche du temps perdu").
And so, the impetus for creating "Nebular Weave" as part of the "Lost and Found" series arose from receiving a picture from a physicist friend. The image unleashed a rush of transformative invention in successive iterations that resulted in what is seen below -- a result, in scope, dimension, appearance, and subject matter, wholly unlike the initial more modest picture.
NEBULAR WEAVE
(40x30" -- SCALABLE)
The following work is intended as a visually-inspired humorous prod to self-reflexion by providing some "food for thought."
The connection between graphic depiction and human consciousness is perhaps as ancient and prehistoric as the earliest cave drawings and paintings. That lengthy timeline provides more than enough proof that the malleability and ephemeral nature of all things human belie the posturing rigidity we sometimes encounter in our fellow earthling inhabitants, who should know better by now, but evidently do not.
In True Buddhism, we understand that it's all a matter of karmic attachments. And, in time, we can "safely" let go, and "change the poison into medicine" to become our best (or "true") self.
IS YOURS A HARDBOILED PERSONALITY?
(30x60" -- SCALABLE)
The natural universe is enchanting in its infinite designs. This visualization celebrates that enchantment.
Query whether one can see this from a spaceship.
GENTIAN SPACE WIND
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
When we consider the criticality of light to life, we ought not to underestimate its vital importance to art. What light makes possible is ineffably wondrous and magnificent.
Perhaps it was an expression of that consciousness that informed in some way the ancient mythology of Prometheus and how his compassionate gift of fire to humankind allowed our species to survive and thrive with the light of night.
PROMETHEAN FIRE
(24x48" -- SCALABLE)
The particle elements of reality are the mosaic constituents of life, as we know it.
At various levels, diverse aspects of the mosaic take form and are revealed to us.
Reality, after all, is multilayered.
PARTICLE PHYSICS
(24x36" -- SCALABLE)
With his famous “Impression Sunset,” Claude Monet made a lasting impression in the history of art and in our way of seeing and appreciating what and how light and color can communicate with us suggestively and enrich our sensibilities.
As a grateful nod to the great master, I have entitled this next work "Impression Springtime."
Mixed light-blue and chartreuse patches capture the essence of springlike hues and cover the field of view as if with a morning mist or fog. But, are we looking up at the sky . . . or at a reflection in a still pond . . . or neither?
IMPRESSION SPRINGTIME
(24x36" -- SCALABLE))
What we call "genius" in an artist's work too often "descends" upon the work when an artist is no longer present to hear it. It is well known that Vincent Van Gogh lived this "delayed response" in spades, yet, it may still come as a surprise when we learn that during his short but prolific lifetime he only sold one painting.
This towering original expanded our visual vocabulary and literacy as only an artistic ground-breaker can. And perhaps most, if not all, artists today would acknowledge their debt to him.
The visualization below could only have been conceived after Vincent showed us how to appreciate color in motion. [Note: his presence is very much in this painting.]
VINCENT WAS HERE
(36x24" -- SCALABLE)
The formal beauty and mystery of the enigmatic are consciousness-expanding without the LSD. I think of the following five "found" images as a group entitled "Material Witnesses."
SNUGLY
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
SIREN CALL
(24x36" -- SCALABLE))
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SEALED LIPS CAN'T LIE
(24x20" -- SCALABLE)
THE WHISPER
(26x24" -- SCALABLE)
CONTENTED
(36x30" -- SCALABLE)
When we find what is latently there via a double take, we -- and certainly artists -- can find a "triple take" that leads to abstraction.
The following two panels (of four) chromatically explore the same abstraction in the spirit of a triple take.
HUES IN ABSTRACTION #1
(36x24" -- SCALABLE))
HUES IN ABSTRACTION #2
(36x24" -- SCALABLE))
WARP SPEED
(24x48" -- SCALABLE)
A further abstract exploration of the triple take resulted in the following "acceleration of color," which captures in a still image the motion and trajectory of the ultra fast.
Human consciousness is the stage where the puzzlements of life are contemplated and sometimes resolved. The ambiguous results when perception and apperception are confused or entwined and certainty becomes elusive or illusionary. This can occur in any number of different life settings and can lead to error or to imaginative recreation or play. In art we can recognize and exploit the possibilities of the seemingly uncertain, and this becomes another source of inspiration or illumination.
As artists, we learn to make lemonade. The following three images are examples.
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UNCERTAINTY
(40x34" -- SCALABLE)
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IN THE MIND OF THE BEHOLDER
(40x34" -- SCALABLE)
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STRING THEORY
(40x34" -- SCALABLE)
Unlike individual atoms, biological organisms get old and die. It's called senescence, and all our ancestors have experienced it, and we are in the process of experiencing it day by day. Within our lifetime, we witness many organisms senesce, but among such organisms, perhaps flowers are the most emblematic of such aging. From bud to fallen petal, they epitomize the passage of time, from beginning to end.
We can become fascinated with the transition, for it metaphorically embodies an analogy for our lives. You see, despite a common ineluctable conclusion, we can learn something meaningful from the "logic of flowers" in that they bloom indifferent to their fate.
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THE RESENESCENCE OF THE ROSE
(20x30" -- SCALABLE)
The mystery of the unknown is the secret of its allure. While we search, we pursue what we think may sooner or later be within reach. And in such quest we confront the challenge of the elusive rare find, which may be discovered in the real world or only in the realm of the imagination.
THE ALLURE OF JASMIN NOIR
(38x40" -- SCALABLE)
In Act 2, Scene 2, of Shakespeare's timeless Romeo and Juliet, we hear Juliet musing to herself on her balcony that "A rose by any other name smells just as sweet," as she questions the significance that Romeo is a Montague. The meanings we attach to things can be as ambiguous as the colors we assign to them. And so, what matters if a rose is red or some other color?
The following two visualizations are from a set of variations in the Lost and Found series.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER COLOR (VIOLET)
(30x40" -- SCALABLE)
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER COLOR (PINK)
(30x40" -- SCALABLE)
"Amapola, my pretty little poppy . . . " goes the lyric to the vintage song by José María Lacalle García as popularized by Jimmy Dorsey. And while this poppy's natural charm can inspire a song, it's darker potential can inspire an uncommon image seen only on a wall or in one's mind.
AMAPOLA'S SECRET ESSENCE
(38x36" -- SCALABLE)
Robert Rauschenberg once declared that "Anything that can reflect light is of some interest."
And, indeed, I would add the corollary that a visual artist only exists for those who can see, both physically and metaphysically.
The subject matter of creation is a perception, conception, or sensation that animates a cascade of inspired activity. In visual art, its manifestation is in some respect formal, whether concrete, amorphous or pleomorphic. Of course, our sensual awareness of a work can be a source of delight, surprise, or a host of frustrations and disappointments. We all know this because those encompass the range of our responses to other sensuous experiences, whether they be acoustic, olfactory, tactile, or gastronomic.
The following visualization arises precisely from the foregoing considerations.
MACROCOSM SERIES
This is my earliest series of artworks and its full title is "MacroCosm: A Macro Exploration of the Micro Universe." A defining characteristic of this series is that each canvas presents what may strongly appear to be something other than what it actually is. Hence, the ambiguity of what is "captured" and shown is the generative focus of this series and is the source of its enigmatic mystery as a related group of works.
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This first visualization below is entitled "Embedded Nature," and it is called what it is. To be sure, only a very few viewers, if any, in the world can identify what this is an image of, but I expect that more than just a few viewers can engage and look at this image carefully and patiently, and then describe what they are seeing in this portion of the "micro universe."
Hint: this visualization can be seen as an imaginary collection of natural forms (what I call "Rorschach-like metaforms") that only become stunningly evident when one's imaginative matching and organizational faculties are allowed to function and interact with the latent and barely-perceived visual animal and human referents (actually, more than two dozen of them), as well as grotesques, in the overall image. Without question, detecting and "deciphering" the imagery in this work requires an attentive examination. And I will not spoil it for you by telling you where to look to find what.
In other words, this work challenges perception at the most elemental level by posing the question "what is it YOU see?" And as a selective and thoughtfully magnified photographic artifact, this image compellingly makes the case that depiction by itself does not always isolate a fixed reality or meaning.
Indeed, when individual subjective perception becomes the essential dynamic tool for deciphering and decoding imaginary imagery, a canvas no longer conveys a static message. In short, the canvas turns into a projection screen and its suggestive "content" (as "framed" by the artist) elicits/extracts meaning from the viewer as an active participant in the "creation" of such meaning.
No viewer should short-change him/herself by "giving up" empty-handed. Indulge and engage your imagination!
EMBEDDED NATURE
(11x17")
As with "Embedded Nature," the next work, "Galactic Menagerie," partakes of that same kind of enigmatic mystery in which the attentive viewer can detect a robust multiplicity of human, animal, and grotesque forms, juxtaposed and superimposed, this time as found in a surreal multilayered landscape.
An application of the same kind of liberated perceptual skills is required to decode and map identifiable imagery that is reconstructed and made sense of only by the viewer's imagination. Again, while it may seem as if one is exploring what is in an artifact, what one is really doing is exploring one's own imagination.
WARNING: one can literally spend many minutes surveying the details of this visualization, both close up and from a distance, to discover the rich "tapestry" of almost subconscious but recognizable forms in this work.
GALACTIC MENAGERIE
(24x40" -- SCALABLE)
Continuing in the aesthetic of "embedded imagery" that can be deciphered only by the viewer's imagination, "The Silence of the Lamb" (my earliest MacroCosm visualization), and "Alchemist's Gold" (a much later work) were arrived at in the same way, by focusing on a portion of a much larger "reality" at different magnifications.
If you can see the "lamb," then what else can you see? -- there's more than enough to keep you looking . . . with your imagination. Admittedly, such searches are more easily and thoroughly conducted with full-sized canvases than with miniaturized views on a website.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMB
(12x18" -- SCALABLE))
ALCHEMIST'S GOLD
(24x36" -- SCALABLE)
To recap, what I am hoping for by means of this MacroCosm series is for viewers to first wonder "what is it?" At the very least, they will take a glance and imaginatively assume it is what it isn't. As mentioned before, perhaps no one will be able to identify what is actually depicted, which can then challenge the "sporting" viewer to patiently perceive or subjectively project from their own imaginative storehouse what is "stored" in the visualization.
Though not as "populated" as the prior images, the following "color-field" visualization, entitled "The Snow Hound," embodies its own perplexing, even surreal, quiddity.
THE SNOW HOUND
(18x16" -- SCALABLE)
As the viewer examines these visualizations with the title in mind, he/she can perhaps see what I see or just see something else -- again, depending on his/her subjective frame of reference. Take "Phantoms of the Slots" below, for example. Do you see any "phantoms"? Move in, and move out. You may soon see that one phantom is looking right back at you as you look for a phantom. But that phantom is not alone.
PHANTOMS OF THE SLOTS
(24x12" -- SCALABLE)
The following work, an elaboration of "Phantoms of the Slots," is an "object lesson" in how the same object can be seen creatively in different ways.
MESSAGES SERIES
Perhaps you've experienced one or several of the following interactions or confrontations, where what is said and the facial language involved "catalyze," whether as stimulus or response.
The messages in words are distinct and are clearly manifested/reflected in the images, or so it seems. Yet what we see at a deeper level of perception is how the depicted image (yes, singular) is actually "adjusting" in significance to the verbal context of each title and thereby deriving its meaning. Enjoy this exploration.
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RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
DON'T LISTEN TO "KAREN": FAUCI, FAUCI, FAUCI!
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT US!"
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
"VOTE BLUE, NO MATTER WHO!" YEAH, YEAH.
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
"BLACK LIVES MATTER!"
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
"YOU'RE NOT EVEN LISTENING. WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO, YELL?"
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
"LOOK, YOU'VE WAITED THIS LONG. CAN'T YOU WAIT A LITTLE LONGER?"
(24x30" -- SCALABLE)
NEBULOSITY SERIES
Among the wondrous manifestations of our earthly landscape, perhaps none other are more spectacular and awesome than those infinitely pliable majestic puffs of water vapor and dust known as clouds.
Just think how impoverished our day-to-day experience would be without their fascinating ever-changing presence!
And, of course, the sky is their transparent insubstantial medium against which those nebular dramas are inexorably choreographed.
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CELESTIAL MONOCHROME
(60x40" -- SCALABLE)
A BARK FROM THE BLUE
(34X54" -- SCALABLE)
IS IT A WHIRLPOOL OR A GALAXY OF CLOUDS?
(32X56" -- SCALABLE)
OUR HISTORY AS IMAGES SERIES
More and more, our collective history has become a catalog of images depicting the memorable, the horrible, and the iconic.
An artist's capacity to distill essence from the passing of time can sum up in a compelling way what has happened.
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The following is a set of four ghostly images that poignantly replay some of the final moments in motion before president John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
What, in hindsight, we know was to come makes that final wave of his hand to bystanders along the route of his motorcade that much more affecting in the fateful "countdown" to a tragic fatality. This metaphoric countdown contrasts ironically with the many other "countdowns" to follow after his presidency when humankind went beyond the confines of terrestrial boundaries to accomplish the goal of a lunar landing conceived and initiated during Kennedy's administration.
The gradual movement and obscuring of JFK's face from frame to frame until it can no longer be seen (almost like the moon moving across the sky and disappearing behind a cloud) transforms his salutational wave of acknowledgment into an unintended parting gesture of farewell.
And, then, there is the insistent, and even jarring, counterpoint of Jacqueline Kennedy's unsuspecting public smile in these final precious moments that adds a haunting element of the surreal to this set of four fateful frames entitled "JFK's Last Wave."
JFK'S LAST WAVE -- FRAME 1
(16x24" -- SCALABLE)
JFK'S LAST WAVE -- FRAME 2
(16x24" -- SCALABLE)
JFK'S LAST WAVE -- FRAME 3
(16x24" -- SCALABLE)
OWS S.O.S. SERIES
This series features many moments that I documented during the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Liberty Plaza in New York City in the fall of 2011.
It pointedly memorializes what I witnessed as a portfolio of historical, digital poster-art images commemorating the spirit of that incipient but aborted people's uprising against the economically-dysfunctional, plutocratic/oligarchic dominance by the self-interested deep-pocket class in America.
OCCUPY YOUR HEART, SOUL, AND WALL STREET
(24X24" -- SCALABLE)
WHATAYALOOKINAT?
(24X24" -- SCALABLE)
DON'T BE FOOLED, NYPD -- WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY!
(20X30" -- SCALABLE)
DEBT IS SLAVERY
(36X24" -- SCALABLE)
A CONVERSATION WITH THE 1%
(36X30")
99% OF THE POPULATION IS CONSIDERED UNIMPORTANT
(24X24" -- SCALABLE)
TO PROFIT FROM SUFFERING IS IMMORAL
(24x36" -- SCALABLE)
I CAN'T AFFORD MY OWN LOBBYIST
(24X24" -- SCALABLE)
IF YOU HAVE, GIVE SOME. IF YOU NEED, TAKE SOME.
(24X36" -- SCALABLE)
WE MAY HAVE DEMOCRACY OR WEALTH IN THE HANDS OF THE FEW, BUT NOT BOTH
(24X24" -- SCALABLE)
JPMORGAN CHASE "BEND OVER AMERICA PACKAGE"
(24X30" -- SCALABLE)
FIGHT CORRUPTION -- NO SPECIAL PRIVILEGES
(36X24" -- SCALABLE)
BILLIONAIRES, YOUR TIME IS UP!
(30X24" -- SCALABLE)
PLANET APOCALYPSE SERIES
Like the Titanic, the world, as we know it, is in for a fateful collision with the titanic hubris of a greed-driven humanity.
Global feedback loops have already been triggered resulting in catastrophic climatic disruptions and the extinction of many animal species. Melting ice caps, rising sea levels, vanishing shorelines, record storms and flooding, protracted droughts, raging wild fires, desertification, and famines have already been recorded -- all of which are technologically irreversible or not preventable.
The musicians are playing on the deck of the Titanic to keep our minds on other things -- after all, we have limited choices: to rue the unavoidable, or to savor to the very end whatever momentarily delights us.
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When viewed from space, we know there are no such things as national boundaries. While we may inhabit a specific spot on earth, we are, in a transcendent sense, denizens without borders, unless we choose (or are compelled) to be confined and nationally defined.
The life of the planet does not recognize or need any such boundaries and proceeds to express itself transnationally. We are living in a very uneasy relationship to that global existence, and seem to live as the captives of self-serving corporate prerogatives and imperatives. The myopic captains of industrial greed rule and define our relationships to each other and to the world, and even the life of the planet is a hostage.
Climate change and global warming are the existential threats of our age, and the planet is responding accordingly.
The image below is another in a continuing series of epitaphs to life as we know it.
INCANDESCENT
(24X54" -- SCALABLE)
Ecocide is the singular self-inflicted catastrophe of our age brought to us by the unsurpassed egocentric greed of fossil-fuel oligarchs the world over. The unstoppable ruin of all has been achieved by the mindless pursuit of short-term gains at the long-term expense of everything else. Too few of us have made our voices heard and our elected representatives have led us to a point of no return.
Humanity's safe harbors and shores are vanishing in real time beneath a black rising sea of petroleum. Our collective impotence has lost our chance to prevent it.
This image could well serve as a tombstone for our civilization.
VANISHING SHORELINES
(48x36" - SCALABLE)
As an eloquent spokesperson for her and future generations, a young person named Greta Thunberg is doing her level best to rebuke policymakers worldwide about the rapidly evaporating time left within which the industrialized nations and corporate industries of the world, constituting the establishment status quo of major polluters, can act forthrightly and in concert to stanch the slide toward another global mass extinction.
FEEDBACK LOOPS: IS IT TOO LATE?
(40X60" -- SCALABLE)
In 1969, when the first astronauts to land on the moon showed us a view of the earth, or what physicist Carl Sagan referred to as the "pale blue dot," we caught a glimpse of our planetary ecosystem as a vulnerable whole, a truly global living environment.
Another way of "re-imaging" that view is as a complex "spinning rainbow" that should always make us think of how not to harm or disturb that celestial work of art.
POLITICS AND STRUGGLE SERIES
There are those who believe that "art and politics do not mix."
But that belief misunderstands that the artistic impulse, at its core, embodies the politics of freedom, and, to that extent, is the essential antithetical expression of that which power politics so often seeks to control or suppress.
By merely being, art can be -- and often is -- "subversive" of an established status quo, which is why artists are considered suspects in totalitarian regimes around the world.
But the arts as protest, or as tools for raising consciousness, are the humanistic means and "weapons" of an armed or unarmed, militant or pacific, opposition to oppression, injustice, abuse, and the derogation of our common humanity. And so, art can be instrumental as a leading edge in the struggle for liberating humanity from its mental and political shackles.
The works in this series are all commentaries on or depictions of people struggling, more or less, against oppressive governmental actions across the globe.
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America began a new chapter on the 1st day of this new year 2022. And I began it with a question: will black people and other people of color continue to be America's "moving targets"?
Are they merely "shooting ducks" for badged and unbadged bigotry? We'll have an answer soon enough, as days come and go in this most racially supremacist and ethnically violent of nations.
MOVING TARGETS
(36x72" -- SCALABLE)
This iconic commemorative image was inspired by the decriminalization of homosexuality in Botswana in 2019. But its celebratory message of liberation from governmental/institutional bigotry is as universal as the outstretched flag being proudly held high.
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FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF GENDER ORIENTATION WORLDWIDE
(26x40" -- SCALABLE)
Each year, the people of Hong Kong used to hold a vigil to commemorate the brutal murder of pro-democracy protesters and their families in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China.
This visualization honors all persons of conscience who hold up their candles in tribute to all who struggle and perish in democracy movements everywhere.
CANDLE-LIGHT VIGIL -- HONG KONG
(24x36" -- SCALABLE)
For the 30th anniversary (2019) of the Tiananmen Square massacres, this digital collage political poster figuratively depicts the impact of the Tiananmen massacres on the five stars of China’s flag.
The large star, lying on the blood of Tiananmen's martyrs, represents the flaccid and devitalized status of the Communist Party of China, and the four smaller similarly-recumbent stars represent the defeated or repressed political status of the working class, the peasantry, the urban petite bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie of China’s so-called "People's Republic."
The tanks and tank tread over the caked spilled blood of the Chinese people speaks to the brutal and inhuman totalitarian nature of China's one-party government, which rules by force, and not by consent of the governed.
%202019%20by%20JdeCP%20%20FNL.jpg)
FALLEN STARS OVER TIANANMEN
(24x36" -- SCALABLE)
On China's 70th birthday in 2019, this commemorative political poster identified and called to account Jiang Zemin, one of the depraved butchers of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres of untold numbers of unarmed democracy-movement protesters and their friends and families. He died in late 2022, an unrepentant enemy and traitor to the Chinese people.
JUNE 4, 1989
(30X24" -- SCALABLE)
And the struggle for democracy continues under a totalitarian one-party dictatorship, and why shouldn't it continue -- this time in Hong Kong? The fraud of a so-called "people's republic" in China is "unmasked" when what we see are the helmeted hidden faces of suppression.
POLICE IN HONG KONG 2019-20 -- WHAT CHINA DOES NOT WANT US TO SEE
(36x60" -- SCALABLE)
How awkward and isolating it must be for supposed salaried “public servants” to be confronted by the public masses they are hired to protect. And when it is the police who can and will inflict the harm, who is there to protect the public, if not the public itself in self-defense? The natural human right and instinct for self-preservation is never trumped when the police are committing the abuse.
It is elementary that when the preponderance of civilian numbers outweighs the number of police, the police must yield and not resort to further force.
PROSECUTORIAL PORTRAITS SERIES
Related to the "Politics and Struggle" series are the following images, which are only three of what I call "prosecutorial portraits" of these three unconscionable monsters in recent times.
Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Li Peng now no longer walk the earth, and eluded being held to account for slaughtering their fellow unarmed Chinese citizens in cold blood.
My images of these brutal, ruthless perpetrators are my posthumous bills of indictment and warrants for their arrest and condemnation for committing crimes against humanity. What they did is what a corrupt and depraved one-party regime does to stay in power, despite the just demands of its citizens.
The famed German-born American philosopher and eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt, in covering the trial of Nazi mass-murderer Adolph Eichmann, coined the expression "the banality of evil" to describe how ordinary human beings can become normalized perpetrators of the most heinous crimes in a totalitarian social order. I sought to portray that phenomenon of normalized barbarity in the disfigured facial features of this despicable trio.
DENG XIAOPING
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
N.F.S.
JIANG ZEMIN
(30x24")
N.F.S
%202019%20by%20JdeCP%20FNL%20sml%20for%20website.png)
LI PENG
(30x24" -- SCALABLE)
N.F.S.
Let this be the legacy and tombstone of Li Peng, the then Chinese premier who ordered and oversaw the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere on June 4, 1989 and thereafter.
What the totalitarian regime in mainland China proved to the world that it is capable of doing to its own people is a threat to all people who prefer and demand democracy instead of the rule of unaccountable might and absolute state control.
LI PENG'S MEMORIAL
(60X48" -- SCALABLE)
In the wake of the horrors of World War II in Europe, the Nuremburg Trials in Germany were a post-war reckoning for the barbarity and evil of heinous state criminality. Of those war criminals who were taken into custody, and tried and convicted, Hermann Göring and Rudolph Hess were among the very highest-level Nazi defendants. Göring eventually eluded punishment by committing suicide while in custody, and Hess hung himself in 1987 at the age of 93, after serving 40 years of a life sentence in Spandau prison for committing crimes against peace. Neither of these Nazis ever expressed any remorse or regret for their wrongful acts.
Each of us has a choice to make about how our life may have a value and significance for humanity.
SHADOWS AND LIGHT/LIGHT AND SHADOWS SERIES
Shadows and light are analogous to other binary means of communication, such as today’s ubiquitous digital codes, using ones and zeros.
In this regard, we can also think of the shadow puppets of Indonesia or the Morse Code dots and dashes on a piece of paper or a computer display. And, of course, we can think of Rorschach inkblots and their latent suggestive messaging.
My MacroCosm series has already introduced what I call "Rorschach-like metaforms" that can only be seen/projected by the liberated imagination of the viewer in the process of identifying embedded imagery within actual visible forms.
Now, with this “Shadows and Light” series, I am inviting the viewer to do something more: to come up with a narrative response – answering the question “What’s going on?”
My titles suggest one possible take as either the beginning of a narrative or just simply a stimulus for the viewer to respond with his/her own descriptive narrative. Fortunately, this experience only invites self-assessment, since there’s no one else to analyze or diagnose you.
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RORSCHACH NO. 1 -- NOW, WHOM COULD THAT BE?
(32X48" -- SCALABLE)
RORSCHACH NO. 2 -- IS THIS SPACE TRASH , A SPACE DANCE, OR WHAT?
(30X48" -- SCALABLE)
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TITANS OF 20TH CENTURY MUSIC SERIES
It should go without saying that the last century would not have been the same or as significant without the great composers and musicians of the concert hall. So, I need not say more about this, except to note that everyone has favorites, and mine are the icons of this series.
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[NOTE: FOR THE MOST RECENT WORKS IN THIS SERIES, GO TO THE "LATEST ARTWORKS" PAGE.]
WATERCOLORS SERIES
Unlike my other series, this "Watercolors" series is a chromatic and design departure in which use of a color wash effect is the idiom of expression. Without employing any straight lines, the irregular outlines and curves of nature are the marking language of this pastel-like digital watercolor imagery.
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MORNING'S GOLDEN ROUGE
(30x36" - SCALABLE)
THE AUTUMN LEAVES
(24x30" - SCALABLE)
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DAPHNIS AND CHLOE
(32x30" - SCALABLE)
"WHO WEARS THE PANTS?" SERIES
It's an old question, suggesting that an attempted challenge to "machista"/male dominance is being confronted/defended by a male chauvinist. Although the question can, quixotically, still arise in today's more politically correct environments, "who wears the pants" is now more a fashion statement than the initiation of a political polemic about male supremacy in advanced contemporary societies. Either way, this amusing parodic series plays on the ambiguity.
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WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 1
(40x27" - SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 2
(40x29" - SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 3o
(40X29" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 4o
(40X29" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 5o
(36X38" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 6
(40X32" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 7o
(40X30" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 8o
(40X30" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 9o
(40X34" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 10o
(40X30" -- SCALABLE)
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? NO. 11o
(40X33" -- SCALABLE)
