SPANISH LESSONS
The series Spanish Lessons was begun in Mexico in 2007, first as a group of pigment prints that were followed by acrylic on paper paintings using similar -- or sometimes identical -- themes. My basic tactic was to combine images gleaned from wall decorations, folk crafts and other Mexican vernacular art with cartoons found in an old Spanish language book along with manipulated sections from the prints of the great Mexican satirist Jose Guadalupe Posada. I sought combinations that would set up clashes between humorous or plainly ludicrous situations and scenes of discomfort or distress if not outright horror. Decorative frames, overlays of shapes and other abstract devices allowed a convincing conjunction of subject-matter and the formal arrangement of the piece. Such abstract elements became foils for the often somber or distressed subject-matter.
RE-MIXico (2014) was a follow-up to the earlier series Spanish Lesson. In RE-MIXico I extended the Mexican themes by adding mask imagery, photographs and, in a few cases, lettering. Some pieces, particularly the cartoon-based ones, were reapplications of ideas that I had first developed in 2007. The drawings and watercolors of Diego Rivera, in partial or manipulated form, were incorporated into a number of compositions and combined with such things as photographic nudes, and manipulated sections taken from my other, unrelated paintings.
Falling Star with Barbed Wire, archival pigment print, 2014., 20x18
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Sometimes A cigar Is Just A Cigar, archival pigment print, 2016
A number of prints in the RE-MIXico series involve photographs of women in erotic or near-erotic poses partially obscured by various Mexican artifacts -- for example, a mask, as in the above image -- or some graphic element garnered from wall paintings, advertisements or Mexican art forms. |
Mexican Angel In Early America, archival pigment print, 2014, 12x16.