Broken Paintings
(2007 - present)

I made my first broken panel painting Pink Nightmare in 2007. It was a visceral response to the endless stream of images in the news of graphic violence in the Middle East and beyond that resulted from the US invasion of Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq. In one newspaper clipping that I still have in my studio, a photojournalist captured the aftermath of a suicide car bombing, an utterly charred and obliterated outdoor market where the bodies of the dead were covered with baby pink blankets provided by the Red Crescent. It was a horrifying, geometric abstract image.

Pink Nightmare was first made as a pristine monochrome painting, which I then completely demolished with a hammer until it was a shell of its former self. It was created and then destroyed. Unlike artists such as Lucio Fontana and other precedents who pierced the surface of a painting in a tasteful, aestheticized way, I was determined to make something violent and horrific, even vulgar. For me, Pink Nightmare and all of my subsequent broken paintings are a kind of exorcism. Most of the works in this ongoing series were produced in response to the continuing political and cultural crisis here in the United States and abroad, which started after September 11 with the second Bush administration and continued through the Trump presidency. The titles of the works are derived from political propaganda, military jargon, and other related sources.