About the Legends series...

The series of oil and gold leaf panel paintings called Legends grows out of the profound impact that living for extended periods of time in two foreign cultures has had on my life. The first culture is Chiapas, Mexico, from which I have taken as imagery the small, woolen dolls representing the Zapatista guerrilla warriors that Mayan women have been making since the 1994 indigenous uprising there. These ski-masked, gun-toting dolls depict Subcomandante Marcos, the uprising's leader, who has become a folk hero throughout the country, as well as other Zapatista figures. These crudely made little dolls are both intriguing and disturbing, appealing and threatening, whimsical and grim. In my paintings they serve as complex metaphors which raise many questions: of childhood and innocence, power and war, oppression and rebellion; and of race, class, and ethnicity.

The second culture is Tuscany, Italy, from which I have taken as imagery the traditional iconography of renaissance painting that originated and blossomed there. The "high art" paintings of renaissance art, icons of first world western civilization, often include the same kind of contrasts as do the "low art" Mexican folk dolls. At the same time that they are beautiful and appealing, they often depict imagery of violence, danger and threat. In my painting they raise questions about the role of religion, history, depiction, myth, legend, and symbol in our understanding of our culture.

The disquieting juxtaposition of guerilla dolls with Christian imagery speaks to the alliance between war and religion, an association both unholy and unfathomable which has nonetheless been ubiquitous throughout the history of the globe. It is sadly clear that our own times are no exception to this condition. The juxtaposition also speaks to the interface between the third world and the first. The same renaissance which produced gold leaf panel painting also produced the bloody conquest of the New World by the Old. Present-day Maya are inheritors of this legacy and centuries later are still struggling against its constraints and repression, the current Zapatista uprising only the latest in long list of such rebellions. Finally, historic specifics aside, my paintings, like the elements they derive from, condense into a single image a conflicting range of emotions and ideas, from the innocent and decorative to the violent and threatening.