Our Love Is All Over The Wall
“Our Love is All Over the Walls” is a playful series of oil paintings. Each depicts couples or cats spewing beams of love that originate from mysterious orifices. Couples are purposefully composed ambiguously, mostly nude, and in interiors spaces like bedrooms or living rooms. In these rooms it seems like something must have happened or is happening because great gobs of color webs or drenches the figures. I’m guessing some act of love or maybe joy caused the tangled aura.
Cats high-fiving cats, a bed covered in slick green webbing, and a man dumping pools of thick blue on top of hardwood floors are a few of the pictures that make up this body of work. The icons came somewhat effortlessly from a repertoire of images I conjure in times of distress. Simultaneously symbolic and literal, the collection is a memoir.
Some of the symbolism is straightforward. The felines in my work are a stand-in for human models. As roommates, my cats are easily accessible and create just as much drama as people. What I need to say using the human figure can just as easily be said using cats, without the baggage of centuries of history. The palette comes from my tendency to use color emblematically. When I was searching for how to represent love without resorting to visual clichés, using color like ejaculations or exclamations came naturally.
This series is a deliberate turn from melancholy and pensive former work. Despite many unfortunate scenarios personal and cultural that could give me ample reason to feel otherwise, these paintings represent a happy prognosis.
