The seductive beauty of New York City has long been central to my artwork and in this new series of paintings I want to intensify its allure by including images of the seductive billboards that rise above its streets and introduce a new theme into my urban landscapes. Like the singing siren-mermaids that captivated hapless sailors in ancient Greece, these modern digitally enhanced women attract and hold your gaze from immense advertisements set above the dense urban clutter.
I had begun photographing New York and layering these images onto my metal leafed cityscapes. While out shooting one night, I was myself transfixed by these giant illuminated women! I now use only images of billboards featuring a single woman making direct eye contact, and edit out any references to logos or products. The lonely perfection of the figures in these billboards is ambiguous, hallucinatory, and mysterious. Photographed mostly at night, their floodlit intensity contrasts with the surrounding darkness, while actual sirens wail towards emergencies in the streets below. A few weeks later, they are gone.
The Siren series expands my artistic vision to include photographic elements in combination with acrylic paint. I print the photographs with light fast pigments on transparent Mylar. Applied onto aluminum-leafed canvasses, the individual sheets form an overlapping shadowy grid. I add paints, pigments, and glazes to create an atmospheric effect that recalls the silver screen from silent movies.
Known for my earlier serene landscape paintings on gold leaf, these new edgy paintings re-interpret the seductive power wielded by the mythic goddesses of Antiquity.
