New Paintings

i've been keeping busy and trying to keep it as simple as possible. i love painting in black and white and i think these images work well with such a limited pallette.

my intention here was to continue exploring the status of the "Other" in society. Children fall easily in to this category.

Children are often viewed as property. As such, their identities are not treated as relevant, if not outright ignored. Being that faces are unique and that when we look at each other, we read each other's facial expressions to gauge emotional responses, to exclude the face is to also exclude a claim to humanity. Bodies are generic, banal... faces are specific, individual. Here, there is nothing for us to relate to... there are no emotions to be read.

These paintings dance back and forth between being snap shots of human beings and images of objects. In these paintings, the absence of the face is an absence of importance. As with the painting of myself as a child in an earlier post, i'm interested in imposed anonymity... social orders that determine levels of relevance and appreciation. The identities and emotions of these children are ignored because it is socially acceptable to do so. It is acceptable to undermine them.