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Nature/Nurture and other old/odd debates is a painting series/comic book of 12 paintings/pages. Each piece is 30″ x 19 1/4″ . Mediums used are; ink, shellac, pencil, acrylic, egg tempera, water miscible oil, on a traditional glue/chalk gesso ground on panel. The paintings were created from 2018 to 2020.

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Pages of a book, paintings on a wall—a familiar presentation, twisted and blended, the edges between the two blurred, so that the familiar becomes strange and surprising.

My  new work incorporates multiple art forms (cartoons, comix, painting, scientific illustration, illuminated manuscripts), multiple mediums (pencil, ink, shellac, egg tempera, enamel, water miscible oils), and multiple conceptual frameworks that allow me to explore a multiplicity of ideas (political, philosophical, cultural, etc.) from multiple points of view. It issues an invitation to interpretation through learned methodologies as well as a hindrance to easy interpretation that encourages a new way of looking at visual art. The paintings themselves both look “like paintings” and like the original artwork for a comic book as well as images from art history (as if reproduced from a textbook) and scientific illustrations of plant and animal life; each painting is also a page in a book itself—and there will be a book (which will invite the question: is this a comic book? An exhibition catalogue?). Challenges to the artist’s/author’s authority are not only welcome but encouraged; meaning is mysterious and often obfuscated (sometimes literally, as when words are erased or covered over or blend into one another).

The paintings themselves are begun in the traditional method of glue/chalk gesso on wood panel, and the framework for the 2-D work to come is the comics panel; within that framework, as elements from painting, illustration, comics, comix, cartoons, illuminated manuscripts, and other artifacts are added and juxtaposed, so are the various mediums associated with those art forms.