PACIFIC PSYCHOPOMPS
The body of work titled “Pacific Psychopomps” explores themes of myth and psychology, as well as philosophic and poetic traditions and their loss. The work includes groups of sculptures, series of paintings and a sequence of poems. “I’ve always had a thing for the classics, the timeless stuff. Lately, I’ve been studying a bunch of Shakespeare and Ovid. I found myself wondering what all these characters would be in Encinitas, imagining Orpheus climbing the stairs at Swamis, or picturing Snug the Joiner in my studio, a midsummer night’s day- dream. Or, in reverse, what would today’s heroes and fools look like excavated from the bluffs or fields? Gonzo and Groucho and Superman in archaic shapes. So here it is: Sunset sessions with idols, or how to philosophize with the hammer.” (“Psychopomp" comes from Greek and literally means the 'guide of souls'. In many cultures these are creatures, spirits, angels, demons, or deities who escort the dead from earth to the afterlife. “Pacific” here means both the ocean and peaceable or conciliatory.)
Psychopomps
“Psychopomps” are ‘guides of souls’. Superman, Wonder Woman or Gonzo the Great: Here are superheroes as primitive stone sculptures, as if excavated from ancient ruins or the depth of our subconscious, in which they have been buried. Contemporary yet prototypical psychopomps. Why Groucho Marx? The theme of the fool, the wise fool, or the jester is a recurring one, and Groucho was one the greats. His subversive surrealism and anarchic anti-authoritarianism are timeless. These four figures are complemented by three more classical figures: Hermes, an angelic figure and a marble-white female figure, making up the seven figures of the painting “Psychopomps By The Pacific”. The angelic figure (“Subliminal Beholder a.k.a Carla”) is on view in Solana Beach and the “Supersubtle Boulder” is on view at UCSD as Snow White.
Five Fates and Furies
In antiquity, Fates personify destiny and Furies are goddesses of vengeance. Interestingly, they are all female and they don’t report to any gods - true girlbosses, truly terrifying. The group is inspired by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon from 1907, which presents five female figures in a provocative composition. It is one of modern art’s most famous paintings, upending perspective and drawing from roots of modernism like Cezanne and Matisse as well as ancient Egyptian and African sculpture. Incidentally this sculpture group is the same size as Picasso’s canvas.
People, Too, Are Psychopomps
It is a composition as tumultuous as the multitudes that contain us; inspired by a painting by Peter Paul Rubens at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The painting may also be a reminder that one can overdo Ovid and read too much Shakespeare: until all these Thou’s and all those Thee’s unspool one’s brain and make one’s head spin, and one has to choose matter over mind. One has to turn from words to wood and stone, play with shapes of torsos found in rotting trunks, and philosophize with the hammer.
Orpheus Series
Orpheus is a mythical Greek poet and traveler between worlds, this world and the underworld, conscious and subconscious, reality and imagination. The paintings reimagine Orpheus and his Eurydice on the stairs at Swamis beach, led by Hermes, herald of gods with winged feet. Throughout art history he has been companion of poets and painters, maker and motif from antiquity through modernity; the German poet Rilke composed a cycle of sonnets to him, and the painting offers a rewriting of “Sonnet to Orpheus, 2.10” (...Though our selves in water mirrored / to us seem often blurred: / Behold the image. // Only the dual realms resound / our echoes and convert / eternal lineage.”)
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The rock sculpture is of Shakespeare with his signature earring, and the four paintings are plays on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis, it is one of the most popular plays, peopled by fairies, nobles, and laborers, mixed up in subplots of wedding preparations and the staging of a play. Not just the scenes of altered states of mind, but the whole thing can be read as a fairy tale, a dream of fluid figures, moving between the realms of reality, imagination and artists’ creation. The paintings show fairies, their king Oberon and their jester Puck, as well as “rude mechanicals”, the craftsmen putting on a play, Snug the Joiner and Nick Bottom.
Goat Herder and Wild Man
These sculptures are allegories. The herder lives in the realm of instincts, a nomad who lives with animals on their land, at home in the wilderness of the heart. He is a guide yet in utter dependence on goats defying deserts. Through the ages the goat has been the great symbol of procreation and creativity. On the opposite side of the yard (and of our mental landscapes) resides the Wild Man, a mythical figure of medieval Europe, a kin to goat-horned fauns and satyrs. Lusting yet lost, in our hearts the Wild Man represents what could be: who at night we want to be, yet in the day cannot become.
Odysseus Series
This series is inspired by a Terracotta figurine at the Getty Villa in Malibu with this description: “A human figure appears to cling to the underside of this ram, his head emerging between its forelegs. Although the meaning of the statuette may be hard to determine today, an ancient Greek would have recognized a reference to a scene from the epic poem the Odyssey by Homer. In the poem, Odysseus and his men escape from the man-eating, one-eyed giant Polyphemos by tying themselves to the undersides of the giant's sheep when he sends them out to graze. The escape from the cave was the most popular episode from the Odyssey represented in Greek art. Especially common in the 500s B.C, it appeared in every artistic medium in both the Greek homeland and the colonies.” Odysseus, the great voyager, is a guide of souls, a psychopomp. It is not a story of superpowers but one of brains over brawn, about the triumph of humility over hubris.