The car is part of the American identity.  Men, in particular, oftentimes tend to express themselves in the vehicle that they drive.  For many, their personality is reflected through the vehicles that they have had, currently have, or dream about having.

When men congregate, the conversation often turns to “My First Car”, or “My Dream Car”.  For many people, their spare weekends are spent tinkering under the hood of some old car that beckons to their youth.  The car has a way of transporting us (figuratively, if not physically) back to a time that we want to remember.

My current body of work takes a look at vehicles in a way that remembers the past as it really is, not necessarily how we remember it. 

These paintings are informed and influenced by the Vanitas paintings that were prevalent in the Netherlandish and Northern European Vanitas works of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.     The word Vanitas is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version.[i]

These 16^th and 17^th century paintings were highly symbolic pieces that included such things as skulls, rotten fruit, smoke, timepieces and bubbles – all suggesting the brevity of life, the meaningless of earthly pleasure and the certainty of death. 

These latest works are influenced by this idea, but reflect the contemporary culture in which I live.  Our post-modern world is filled with the excesses of this world.  We are surrounded by the never-ending drone of advertisers reminding us of the need for newer, bigger, faster and better things in our life.  But the products that fill us with joy today will be obsolete tomorrow.  No matter how often we replace the old with the new, it will never be new enough.  We find ourselves in a race that cannot be won.

My work is an attempt to depict the ugly, the discarded, the worn-out and the worthless in a way that not only reminds us of times gone by, but also of our own mortality.  When I see something that was manufactured during my childhood, and it is decayed, broken and left to rot in a field, it reminds me that I too am aging and that my “serviceability” on this planet is limited as well.