I will have a new painting at the Metallica "Obey Your Master" group show at Exhibit A Gallery in Los Angeles. The private premiere with Metallica will be January 20th.

I will also be participating in the "About Face" group show at WWA Gallery in Culver City that begins Friday January 13th.

In addition, my two landscape paintings are still on display at the "100 Grand" show at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara. That show closes on January 29th.

Details for all the shows are here.

Finding Beauty in Dark Places

The Germans have a word "unheimlich" that is difficult to translate into English, although a blur between the words "uncanny" and "eerie" perhaps comes the closest to providing a definition.

In each of my paintings, I am trying to find the beauty in that uneasy twilight place between life and death, between reality and unreality, between self and what writer H.P. Lovecraft called "the others".

The objects in my paintings draw from the classic symbolism of Vanitas still life and Catholic religious paintings; all refer to the cycle of life, death, and the promise of resurrection.

I love this poem by Emily Dickinson:

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, -the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

My entire body of work is an attempt to capture the feeling I get every time I read it. One day I might succeed, until then here are my paintings...