At about 9yrs old, I saw my first turkey get its head chopped off. It all went downhill from there. My father being a life-takin‘, heart-breakin, ex-Marine, Vietnam vet Irishman and my mother a (mostly) peace loving, go with the flow Wiccan, hippie nurse, you can well imagine myself and my four brothers were screwed! Despite it all, my parents taught us how to look at the world with the morose pessimism of an Irishman and then laugh at it and every shitty thing it can throw at you.
I grew up watching bad people do bad things to other people, and yes, like every other human on this planet (’cept maybe GW) had more than a few done to me. As my talent has developed, so to has that little voice inside my head (no, not that one.), pointing out just how absurd man really can be. It started out all dark for me, there is no hope, humanity is lost, yadda, yadda. Then I started to see the pattern in it all. Slowly, I began to realize that in each crappy thing man did to one another, the common thread is irony. Not just good ole fashion irony, but a more insidious type, an irony that transcends all other forms of irony. I discovered that in all these horrors humans can impart on other humans, that other humans in some way allow it to happen and eventually it all circles around again with new faces and nastiness. I thought to myself, that’s absurd!! I’m gonna paint about it and then change the world!!! Nah, not really. After all, I am a registered republican. I’ll leave the world changing’ crap to my hippie, liberal mother, girlfriend, daughters and step-son (sheesh!! I’m surrounded by ’em!). All I do is put things together to make sense of it all, or sometimes, to show the inability of some subjects to make any sense at all. Man is one silly, messed-up, sorry son-ofa-gun, but we can laugh, and that’s something.
"Art is power, so is a well placed bullet to the back of the skull."