Paintings
In these paintings each separate character and image carries with it a back story of memory and association - comic books, classical paintings, signs and symbols, texts, advertisements, trash, and products. These images are culled from a collective memory, mostly American, in which a viewer might both remember the original context… and then create a new active mental and emotional response to the images’ juxtapositions. The paintings are composed to create a kind of visual poem in which the eyes can move from image to image imagining their suggested relationships or lack thereof… some collide and some bond. The entire painting is a thematic work made of parts which create a whole. The paintings are not intended to “stand still” but to create a kind of passive/electric panorama of association, a pictorial tableau much like our thoughts.
Many of these paintings come from the New York era of the early 1980s and were painted amidst that lively period of the Mudd Club, CBGB’s and East Village galleries.
Later works painted in Los Angeles reflect a different poetic mission - more calm, more surrealistic, and concerned more with open space. A bi-polar, bi-coastal enigma of place and time.
The abstract watercolor series was created in Los Angeles and many of these paintings were then animated for Pitt’s 2013 film “Pinball.”
