odd the more aware I am becoming of my little dream world the more I hold onto my little space in the world and make it more like my paintings.... paul
10 Arlington Street/Easthampton, MA, United States
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Images like these came naturally. As a child, I made elaborately decorated paper hearts, in Easter egg colors, sprayed with perfume wrapped in Saran Wrap, trying endless ways to put together replicas of lilies of the valley and violets. At the same time, I was drawing pictures of men in science fiction machines that would alter them into superior beings like those I saw in bodybuilding magazines.
Combining multiple images that relate to each other is always puzzling, but the imagery used reflect my anxieties of living in suburbia, and fantasies of being powerful and invulnerable.
In this body of work the images overlap or are attached, and the relative sizes of the figures differ. Flowers, insects, birds are much larger than people, while the furniture can be smaller or larger. This creates a tension that would not otherwise exist. The men either clothed or nude are decorative, along with the fauna and inanimate objects, but they represent the ideal male physique (or at least what gay culture believes the ideal male should look like.) Yet these perfect beings are not masters of their environment, they are subject to the creatures and objects that surround them.
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