Detail from "The Creator" (2024)

 I sometimes make very elaborate digital paintings that are meant to be shown as big prints on canvas (big meaning 6 or 7 feet wide). Unfortunately, that makes them pretty hard to share on social media. To get around the limitations of people's phones and laptops, I'll post a few zoomed-in "details." 

Here's one of them - from a piece I've been working on for about 20 years called "When He Becomes the Creator, Will He Let Us Exist?" Here we see the star of the piece, the "Creator," up to His ass in the Pond of Possibility. In His left hand He holds a metal censer from which emits "idea gas." This gas seeds the miasmic airs of the Underconscious, causing creative fogs to condense and trickle into the Pond. In His right hand is His ceremonial paintbrush, which He waves in the air like a conductor, willing different scenes and scenarios into existence.

Like all of my "fine art," this piece is based on a "found" image. In this case it's an old illustration I came across many years ago of some geologists looking at the inside of a gigantic volcanic caldera, in either Hawaii or Yellowstone, I forget. I'll post the source below, as well as an uncropped version of the whole painting for comparison.

As a final little note, the title is taken from the great old X-Ray Spex song "Genetic Engineering". RIP Polly.

Source image (artist and date unknown)

Uncropped painting

Game (2024)

 Here's a new version of a piece I did back in the 1990's called "Outdoor Life." The first version was a digital photo collage made using toys (and a guy I knew who posed for the face). In this iteration I retitled it "Game" and tried to make it look more "painterly." The original version can be seen by clicking the "Early Photo Based" link on the right column.

Self-Portrait in Red, Yellow, Pink (2024)

This is a digital collage/painting based on a panel from "The Hawk" #5, a comic book published in 1953. The source drawing is by Dan Barry, with inking by Murphy Anderson. 

Being from Winnipeg - a prairie city in the Canadian West which has the largest Indigenous population in Canada - the figure of the "cowboy" (either a settler himself or a recent descendent of settlers) always loomed large for me — a big hill of unresolved problems which I'd grown up playing on without a care in the world.

 

Preventing the Rape (2024)

This is a new version of a digital collage I made in 1994 or '95 (that version can be seen in the "Early Collage" gallery linked to on the right side of this page.) The collage is based on a Peter Paul Rubens/Jan Wildens oil painting from 1618 - "The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus" (Wildens did the background). The painting depicts a mythological Greek scene in which Castor and Pollux abduct Phoebe and Hilaeira, who are daughters of Leucippus of Messenia.

1994 was still the early days of digital imaging, and I was amazed at how Photoshop allowed me to work directly with scanned images and scale or rotate them as needed to fit into a collage. I decided to try a "Ship of Theseus" strategy, where I'd replace each major element of an oil painting with some other chunk of image that resembled or was analogous to it -- which I'd find by rifling through books and magazines (this was pre-internet).

I worked without much in the way of preconceived goals - my idea was really to see what sort of accidental changes and disjunctions would creep into the old painting as I gradually pasted in replacement parts: "here's a comic book drawing of a horse in a similar pose", "here's a Roman centurion illustration from the 60's that would work for Castor's head", "here’s a nude woman in a girlie magazine striking a similar pose to one of the daughters," etc.

When I was almost finished I was struck by the reality that none of my changes had really affected the now-highly-problematic “meaning” of the Rubens piece. So, to avoid looking too complicit (always a risk for male artists trying to be ironic and postmodern) I replaced Pollux with a sci-fi superhero from an old pulp magazine cover — saving the damsels and “Preventing the Rape.”

 

Advent of the Superstalker (2024)

Superstalker started out as part of a series of images I made in the late 90's using a 3D figure modelling software called "Poser." Poser had lots of controls to make people various ages, heights and ethnicities -- and one of the dials you could twist was labelled "Superhero". I quickly found out that if you pushed this setting too far the underlying 3D geometry would become unstable and the figure would "explode" into a crazy, complicated abstract shape.

At the last second before they blew apart, the figures would teeter on the edge of a gender abyss - so masculine that they were feminine, or so feminine that they were masculine. They also looked very, very "posthuman."

I loved how crazy and problematic and unintended these results were, so I made a lot of work around them, including a short film called "Super Love People" (which was shown at the Coney Island Film Festival about 20 years ago) and a comic book story based on it (which was published in a couple of different comics anthologies). There was also a huge canvas print made of an earlier version of this image for a 2 person show I had in Manhattan in 2000 with my sadly departed old friend Roland Brener.

The Bachelor and His Bride, 2024

Based on a promotional still for “The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Mountain”, a sci-fi/comedy movie from 1959 that featured Lou Costello as an inventor trying to restore his giant girlfriend to normal size.

I’ve always been struck by pop culture stories of men (usually lonely geeks) trying to use science or magic to find and control (or even create) artificial mates — the examples are numerous, and could arguably extend to the Adam and Eve story. In this case there appeared to be some sort of computer being used by the Costello character, which reminded me of the trend among certain young men to imagine their own “waifus” - fictional girlfriends based on characters from anime or video games - which is rapidly gaining traction thanks to “chatbots.” 

One summary of the film’s plot which I found online suggested that the device was also a “time machine,” and since the off-the-shoulder dress on the “bride” seemed a bit Grecian, and Costello’s limp bowtie struck me as somewhat Victorian, I wound up mutating the image into a courtship story between an H. G. Wellsian adventurer and a mythical goddess.

The title of the piece is a nod to good ol’ Marcel Duchamp and his seminal work of freely associated found images “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.”

Gorilla, 2024

 This piece started life as an ad for "Gorilla" brand shoes which I spotted in a store window in downtown Winnipeg, sometime around 1990. The store owner's son saw me taking a photo of it from the sidewalk, came out to ask me what I was doing, and would up taking the cardboard display out of his window and giving it to me! I still have it in my basement somewhere...

The image appealed to me on two levels: first was the way the overtly phallic shoe was also, on closer inspection, vulvic too. Second was the craziness of painting an angry "animal" in a "natural" setting attacking a manufactured human artifact - all done as an advertisement. 

This is the sixth version I've done of this image over the years - a couple of earlier versions can be seen in the "Early Paintings" and "Early Photo Based" galleries linked on the righthand sidebar.

Europa in America, 2024

I have a long-standing fascination with Titian's work (back in 1992 I reworked his "Bacchus and Ariadne" for the cover of Crash Test Dummies' "God Shuffled His Feet"), mostly because it's such a great example of mixing "high" (fine art painting) and "low" (lurid content). 

This piece is based on "The Rape of Europa" from the early 1560's, which depicts the goddess Europa being abducted by Zeus/Jupiter (the bull). It was commissioned by Phillip II of Spain, who kept it in a private room where he could display it for his male guests. In other words, it was highfalutin' porn - but over the centuries it transmogrified into a respected highlight of European art history.

I started making studies for this image in the late 1990's but only got it where I wanted it to go with this version. Content-wise, the major change I made was to add a "saviour" (America/Jesus) for poor pagan Europe/Europa. In the spirit of Euro-centric allegorical practices from the early Baroque, America/Jesus is presented as a white guy in pseudo First Nations clothing.

The Artist's Brain Paints a Picture, 2024

Based on an illustration in Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, Volume 2, a children's reference book published in 1929. I was delighted by its cheerful Modernism, placing the brain of a white male artist (in a nice suit!) at the centre of the world and explaining the artistic process with a simple diagram.

Composition of the Body and Its Surroundings, 2024

This piece is based on an illustration of the atomic/molecular ingredients of a man and his environment I found in an old science textbook from the 1950's or 60's. Making this new version now, decades later, I couldn't help but imagine the atoms and molecules of the source image forming into chains of DNA, or maybe some sort of postbiolgical information - turning the body "posthuman" and "postgender".