New Work: 'Fear and Autonomy'

I've just completed a new piece entitled Fear and Autonomy. It's dimensions are 76x101cm or 30"x40", acrylic on panel. (Please click on image for a higher resolution view.) A statement and description of this piece follows:

 Much of my current work explores the existentialities of human experience. In the painting Fear and Autonomy, I have focused on the plight of the individual within a world of influence and oppression. On a daily basis we are bombarded by conflicting interests in culture, faith, politics, and relationships. The individual self can be literally overwhelmed by these waves of dissension and stimulus, its faltering ego washed overboard into swirling seas of cultural excess.

In this work I have endeavored to depict an ego enmeshed within the trappings of divergent cultural effects, the colorful but often questionable results of our meandering pursuits for meaning and personal resonance in this modern age. Between affectations and pretensions that belie our insecurities we find paranoia and fear; the curse of living in a world where information rests at our fingertips is the ever-lurking reality that we are not at all omniscient, and truth is as elusive as ever.

The female figure in Fear and Autonomy seems to be floating toward the sky, and consequently the unknown. As the mythic account of Daedalus and his fated son Icarus implies, there is danger in this undertaking. I co-opted “terror eyes“, large blow-up balls marketed to ward off pigeons and starlings, as symbols of the paranoia-inducing tumult of the kinetic world around us. The composition of this painting was meant to induce a chaotic dynamism even while an equilibrium is evident.