“Your bomb paintings are so cheerful, they look like they’re skipping to school.”
– Lisa, artist at “War – Artists Respond” exhibit
This series of images of nuclear explosions is an attempt to address in concrete terms the dread so many of us share about the proliferation of nuclear bombs throughout the world, a proliferation that has been going on longer than my own lifetime. The number of such weapons and the scale of their destructiveness is so large that it becomes abstract to us, removing us from full comprehension, and ultimately, responsibility for their presence.
My original intention was to paint a wall of a hundred of these bomb paintings.
By means of a repeated representation of these explosions that are “numerous” on an individual human scale, I hoped to instigate a more direct comprehension of how numerous these weapons are on a global scale: the hundred images proposed for this series are only a fraction of a percent of what would be required to depict all the nuclear bombs on the planet. In the end, I couldn’t focus my energy in this direction 100 times, however.
From a purely visual standpoint, these paintings continue my exploration of depiction of cloud-like forms.