2016

Work and Projects from 2016:
PRESCIENCE- pre-science (noun) - The fact of knowing something before it takes place; foreknowledge.

"With extraordinary prescience, Jung actually predicted the Nazi eruption."
"With extraordinary prescience, Santino actually predicted the slow warming, the swelling, the hot-reddening, the burgeoning, the painful binding building of the ultimate throbbing whitehead, and at last, the bursting of the American hate-pimple complete with the eruption and release of T**** bile."

Well, so says me, anyway. Take a look at this work from 1988 which has suddenly become relevant:

"TET-TRUMP" 48" x 96", encaustic on carved dense foam, 1988.
Click here for a gallery of images of this work, in fine art cold storage since 1990, opened in 2016.

Back in the 1980s, I worked painting and plastering apartments on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Donald T**** was just beginning his rise to notoriety, in New York anyway, and I did work on a few projects in the newly constructed T**** Tower. I know that the vast majority of Americans became familiar with him as a result of the TV show, but some of us go back much further.
T**** would be railing on about how successful he was, completely oblivious to his inherited position of privilege. I used to tell the guys I worked with, guys from tough, poor backgrounds - living in Queens, the South Bronx - dangerous neighborhoods then - that just their getting from their apartments, getting to the train and getting to work was more of a true heroic accomplishment than this spoiled little rich boy making a million dollars on a real estate sale. T**** came to symbolize all that was going wrong about America.
In that same period, I was beginning to flesh out my ideas about this "going wrong" as it related to America and Western Culture. Ideas that later became the basis for "Failure Institute" which was started in 1990. The key, it seemed to me, the starting point was the Tet Offensive of late January 1968, and those images of Viet Cong troops on the grounds of the American Embassy in Saigon. When I watched the broadcast of the film of that attack on the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite had an odd look in his eye, and I knew something had changed about my country.

In 1988 I decided to connect these threads and created a work intended for the floor entitled "TET-TRUMP"
Click here for a gallery of images of this work, in fine art cold storage since 1990, opened in 2016.

Also in 2016, The Head of Santino!

"Finally, there are going to be enough of me to go around", says Santino.
This life-size plaster cast multiple of the Santino bust is realized in May. Click here for a gallery of images of the new busts:

Also in 2016, The Remarkable People.

In 2016, along with casting the busts, I started work on a group of 12 paintings entitiled, "12 Remarkable People I Have Come to Know in Eureka". These paintings became a catalyst for a new book project, realized in 2022.

Clicking on the image will open a JavaScript popup gallery:

These images are of the digital prints I work from. The actual paintings, 30" x 24" (each), are oil on canvas.

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