COLLATERAL DAMAGE

As artists explore visual and conceptual options they often end up with a small group of works which are inconsistent with the  series they are currently working on. And as a professor once said ” sometimes you have to leave one of your children behind”. This applies not only in the visual arts but in writing and music as well. Friends who are writers have described how, even before their work goes to an editor, they often know that one of their favorite characters or chapters are going to be eliminated. So it goes metaphorically, into the back of the closet. Such is the case with the two images above.  I thought two decades ago that these works were going to be part of the “Correspondence” series. But no,  it was clear to me I had to leave them behind. Until now.

The question I was asking myself was: How to represent the millions of children trapped behind political, physical and cultural walls. Their lives in the cross hairs  of global events not of their making.

As I began planning  some two dimensional works to accompany the large “Perilous Journey” installations I revisited the imagery in these orphan works. There I found these children holding hands; faceless, floating in a desolate  non descriptive abstract landscape.  Immediately I decided that together or solo these silhouettes would become the primary images in the “Collateral Damage” series  of painted works on paper.   

Below one of a growing body of paintings on Fabriano classico paper.   image size 9.5×9″

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

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