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|  | | Group Iconographies®
I have used the term ‘Group Iconography’® to describe these paintings, chiefly because I couldn’t come up with anything more pompous and pretentious sounding. Nonetheless, the term is fitting since each of these works is a pastiche that assembles and juxtaposes multiple iconic portraits. These readily recognizable images are drawn from a wide array of familiar visual media –magazine covers, coins, sculpture, photographs, comic books and the like. While each work seeks to faithfully imitate the style, medium and vocabulary of the original images, I haven’t made a fetish out of it because, frankly, that would be way too much effort.
Each collection of portraits coalesces around a unifying – and generally humorous – theme. The first-person voice in the titles keeps the focus on the idiosyncratic selection and juxtaposition of images while hinting at - but not explicitly revealing - the unifying theme, leaving each viewer free to explore the interplay of images and discover, for himself or herself, the unifying principle. In a sense, each painting is a sort of puzzle to be solved with portrait pieces.
In making the title integral to the work and uniting the individual portraits with a verbal rather than visual motif, I sought to fuse words and images and blur the boundary between the literary and the figurative just because I can.
Of course, you must consider the possibility that I made-up all this thoughtful-sounding stuff in a spasm of narcissistic self-indulgence and, in actuality, the paintings are just jumbles of familiar faces. |
| | | | | |  | | Blanks
A collection of paintings, which, in varying ways, reflect my interest in conveying the subject's mood or personality through means other than facial expression. Hence, in each case, the subjects' faces are 'blank.' |
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