I like this painting. It’s so different than really any that I did before or after and really it’s not just this painting it’s that whole group. I haven’t looked at these for quite a while. I haven’t really really thought about them for quite a while, but I guess these canvases must be rolled up in one of my closets. I’m gonna have to get them out – probably not now but – once I retire, maybe put some of them in frames and hang them on the walls or maybe not put them in frames and hang them on the walls. I don’t know that I really necessarily wanna look at this one every day, but it’s definitely one that I really like, out of the things that the AI is chosen for me to talk about so far. I think this is more along the lines of something that I might’ve chosen for myself, if I had been choosing for myself instead of having the AI pick them randomly.

This painting is called Buhriz after Buhriz, Iraq where a lot of fighting was going on in 2005-2006, which was when I was doing the prep work for this series. I have a folder somewhere on an external hard drive that is filled with images, news articles and information old and new (at the time, although this was 20 years ago, so it’s all old now) having to do with violence. One of the interesting things about this particular painting is that it’s one of the rare instances when I’ve worked on current events as subject matter, which is something I’ve always kind of wanted to spend more time with, but – aside from this and several others from this series – I haven’t really explored doing that. When the AI chose this painting, it caused me to go to the website and check out this group of paintings there.

This is from the Raising Cain series from 2006, which I painted in Cincinnati that summer after having spent the first part of the year down in Guatemala. While I was down there, I was doing a lot of the planning and prep work for these paintings – unrelated to Guatemala itself, despite its own experience of violence in the not too distant past – but my thoughts had really turned to violence as a topic in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had gone down to Guatemala just to get away a little bit and slow time down from the more hectic pace of my life in Venice (LA). And so, that’s where I planned this group and when I got back, I went to Cincinnati to paint, simply because I had a studio available there. I returned to Venice in the Fall and showed these in a couple different spots. It’s kinda nice to see the photo of this painting. I haven’t looked at these for a long time, but I think they’re really kinda good paintings – seen from the retrospective distance of twenty years.

Update: I decided to go check out that folder of source materials and research materials that I gathered in preparation for this series. Many of the photos are terrible and brutal and very hard to look at. The source image for this painting is much less horrific, but given the context of the other photos, it is still heart wrenching. I think I made a pretty good painting here, but I don’t think I captured the horrors of war that the photos did. I suppose I’m no Goya after all. But anyway, had I attempted a depiction of one of the other photos, I’d probably not have the heart to include it here – I wouldn’t want to impose that on a viewer, but I will go ahead and post this one, because it’s not especially gruesome, although it is hard to look at. I think it gives some insight into this painting’s origins and intentions though, so it seems like a valuable inclusion to this post – I’ll blur the subjects face though.