Deep Water Horizon / Burchfield combines the historic image of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with Charles Burchfield’s painting of 1917 titled Insect Chorus. On April 20, 2010 while drilling at the Macondo Prospect, an explosion on the rig caused a blowout that killed 11 crewmen and ignited a fireball visible from 40 miles away. Two days later the Deepwater Horizon sank leaving the well gushing at the seabed and causing the largest oil spill in U.S waters. These images both appeared in the New York Times in 2010, the year of Burchfield's Whitney retrospective Heatwave in the Swamp. Despite the distance in time between the Burchfield whose turmoil was created using graphic conventions, the painting seemed to call out in distress to the roiling image of the Deep Horizon architecture as it sank.
A huge plume of smoke where a bomb was set off, a small figure running. Hovering over all a superimposed Michael Jackson glove. The images give in to or take visual custody over each other in the context of a meaningless war. Each image is universally recognized within distinctly different cultures: Michael’s glove within art and the bomb within military culture. Why the glove is out-sized in relation to the tiny running figure is inconclusive. As is whether Micheal's glove in the context of the battlefield might reference a traditional peace sign or alternatively a diamond studded high five to war.
Central to the Hope / Bomb painting is the well-known Shepard Fairey image that Obama appropriated to great electoral result during the 2008 presidential campaign. Originally used as a street poster, Fairey fused forever the Obama portrait and the word HOPE. Obama himself later had a version of the poster hung - as his first official POTUS portrait - in the (U.S) National Portrait Gallery. My painted version consists of a New York Times photo of art handlers hoisting the Fairey portrait onto the museum wall. Interspersed in three sections around the Obama portrait is a photojournalist image of Iraq at the same time with a bomb going off stage left. The backgrounds convey the impression of a continuous passage although in the original sources one is a gallery and the other a war torn sky.
In Car / Karzai a car is racing towards a bright colored bomb in the background. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan cups his hand behind his ear as if straining to hear as a similar bright colored blast goes off in his sector. An acidic yellow portrait of Obama has an includes an inset where his ear is enlarged. Straining tension and dissonance abound.
Compard in Bernstein / Ebola the open arms of both figures. The famous symphonic conductor is in rapturous state and very much in control of musicians and audience as only art can provide. Compared to life in extremis where the lone doctor spreads his arms to medically assist with seeming little veritable control over final stages of a patient's difficult life.
In Bush / Bailout the famous George W. Bush and Hank Paulson do a handshake over the aid to failing banks, calling for the federal government to buy up to $700 billion of mortgage-backed securities and reduce potential losses encountered by financial institutions owning the securities. On an interrupting panel Leonard Bernstein appears in conductor's mode above an image of a can of milk spilling in China. Both suggest extended consequences of other concerns such as the art and international sectors that will be effected.
In 'Jeffrey Pine' / Chile Mine a threatened landscape combines of two different scenes. Anselm Adams's famous photograph of a Jeffrey Pine is set above the bleak site of a screen monitoring the event of the collapsed Chilean mine in 2010. In an attempt to dramatize environmental threat, both images are tinted blue leaving the big rock to appear to teeter into the mine scene below and the monitor showing an imagined explosion that in reality didn't occur. A two month entrapment had the world suspecting the worst.
