Counterpart is my most recent narrative sequence and is about The Double. I have completed my research and have painted four of the sixteen pieces of the sequence; the project is well underway, but is still in-progress.
In addition to the subject of The Double I want to explore the concept of time in my Counterpart series. As they often have been, dualism, opposition, and sequential narrative will be central themes in this work. In my opinion narrative sequences are underused in contemporary painting; a single painting can convey simultaneity well but it cannot do what time-based media can: clearly depict a plot line and chronology. By combining the simultaneity of the individual painting with the time-play of sixteen separate images my work will explore time by breaking it down, shuffling, and rearranging it.

Casein is also underused in contemporary painting, but I feel is effective in developing the out-of-time, dream-like, and surreal aspects of the Double. To create these altered psychological and temporal states, artists must reshape the aspects of color in a way that is unlike how humans see reality physiologically. Typically, using black and white, which eliminates the ‘hue or color’ aspect of color, does this. I rely on other means: I restrict the value range of the colors, but do not alter the hues. Casein intrinsically has a limited value range that is matte and leans toward lighter values. Dark values in casein dry lighter and the light values dry darker. Casein suggests these psychological and temporal altered states because it alters the value range cues that humans associate with the actual.

Ten years ago I used Hogarth’s print sequence "Industry and Idleness" as a leitmotif for my exploration of The Other: I painted a narrative sequence, entitled “Expectations & Desires,” about the success of one twin and the failure of his brother in the contemporary workplace. Unlike Hogarth who depicted his duo’s behavior and its consequences as black and white, I depicted the in-between and the mixed emotions, which motivate the visible behaviors of the seemingly black and white work-a-day, success or failure world. Fear, anxiety, frustration, societal expectations, desire, loss of morale, and ambition were my themes —not simply laziness or industry. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that twins emote and behave similarly, I strove to show the irony between their appearance and their personalities.

Since 2000, I have experimented with bifurcated formats piggybacked on narrative sequences in the works "Two Voices" and "Saint George". "Two Voices" comprises twelve split-screen casein paintings in which the split format of each painting creates mini-narratives within the greater meta-narrative of the sequence itself. A woman occupies the right half of each painting and a man the left half. Both seem to be going about their daily routines. His space is cluttered, sparse, and simple while hers is orderly and opulent. At first "Two Voices" appears to be an examination of opposing gender stereotypes. However, the progression of the sequence reveals that their routines have a common purpose: they are getting ready to meet each other. And yet, the bifurcations literally show solitude; the man and woman live in different spaces and places, which could be miles apart. Furthermore, these splits highlight possible differences in desires, expectations, lifestyles, economics, world-view, and ambitions that could present obstacles to a successful encounter. On the other hand, despite their connotations as divisions, these vertical splits that vary in wavelength from painting to painting become oscilloscope-depictions of the waxing and waning of the desires and fears that both characters have. The contrary impulses of separation/attraction become more evident from one painting to the next in the progression, but in spite of these differences that could repel, they might attract. Opposites attract?

In 2005 I made a political narrative, "Saint George", in which I divided a 5’ x 6’ canvas (in oil) into four quadrants of unequal size. Each section depicted a different emotion and reaction to the prospect of George W. Bush mis-leading America for another four years; "Saint George" is four paintings on one canvas. Each part, a quarter of a smashed mirror, represents emotional opposites not only expressed in the individual characters’ faces and body language but amplified in the very splitting of the design into four topsy-turvy units. Anxiety and composure, uncertainty and confidence, and outrage and apathy (to name a few)—the quadrants reflect the characters’ reactions to the disquiet of the world. The shattered mirror is a visual metaphor for the characters’ individual upset and the entropy of our nation. Taken in whole the painting intentionally confounds the viewer's attempts even to order its mere four sections chronologically. This irreparable shattering of time is a visual metaphor for the nation's dashed hopes.

“Counterpart” will explore how a sequence can function as a compositional unit, conveying formally and metaphorically ideas about the theme of The Double. Of the sixteen paintings, the last four will be a reflection or mirror of the first four. The middle eight paintings will portray a magical or surreal transformation of the main character into his double. I want this compositional construction to make evident that there is a quality of sameness or in-commonness inherent in opposites, and in this case the hero and his double. The hero and double’s gestures/poses may resemble each other in certain paintings and their counterparts, but the actions associated with the gestures and their outcomes will be diametrically opposed. For instance in Painting #2 from a bird’s-eye angle, a naked man lies on a bed. Disheveled and bearded, he is in a fetal position, clutching the sheets. From the bottom edge of the composition, morning light enters the room, casting the shadows of window frames and trees on the floor and the body. In #2’s counterpart, Painting #15, also from a bird’s-eye perspective, a man and woman lie naked in bed holding hands. From the top edge of the composition moonlight enters and casts shadows of window frames and trees on their naked bodies and floor.

Windows will function as a chronometer that reinforces the reading of the sequence and the plot. Depictions of windows, shadows of windows, reflections of windows, reflections in windows, and light from windows, will expand my notions of dualism and doubling, in relation to the echoes device mentioned in the previous paragraph. In Painting #3 the bearded man from Painting #2, solemnly dresses a mannequin. In the center of the composition, a double set of windows, containing a brilliantly illuminated building, silhouettes the characters. In its corollary Painting #14, the double, who is a bald, clean-shaven, and dapper version of our hero, dines with a woman wearing the mannequin dress from #3. The same gesture used to dress the mannequin is used to toast a real woman. The double set of windows has become a double set of French doors. It is night, and we see the couple only as reflections in the doors.

In the middle eight paintings, #5-#12, windows are conspicuously absent; the omission intimates a dream-like or supernatural removal from reality occurring out of time. Amplifying this phantasmagoria with time-stretching, the middle sequence is intentionally twice as long as the segments on either end. Harold Bloom expresses eloquently in his introduction to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in Modern Critical Interpretations this tension between otherworldly, out-of-body feelings and the hard realities of the prosaic:
“Love is jealousy, jealousy is the terrible fear that there will not be enough space for oneself (including literary space), and that there never can be enough time for oneself, because death is the reality of one’s life. A friend once remarked to me, at the very height of her own jealousy, that jealousy was nothing but a vision of two bodies on a bed, neither of which was one’s own, where the hurt resided in the realization that one body ought to have been one’s own. Bitter as the remark may have been, it usefully reduces the trope of jealousy to literal fears: where was one’s body, where will it be, when will it not be? Our ego is always a bodily ego, Freud insisted, and jealousy joins the bodily ego and the drive as another frontier concept, another vertigo whirling between a desperate inwardness and the injustice of outwardness.”

Good vs. evil, madness vs. sanity, usurpation vs. self-preservation, reality vs. dream, dream vs. supernatural, and birth vs. death—of one’s being and identity as well as physical birth and death—are my Double themes. My overarching goal is to investigate how this interplay of dynamic opposites, embodied by the hero and his double, undermines the hero’s attempts to deal with longing, and conversely, assists the double in his success at love and existence at the expense of the hero.

View the work from "Counterpart" here.