This is a comic meditation on interventionism.

We've all seen so many Triumphs of Venus/Galatea. I've always wondered what it would look like if Galatea/Venus was actually triumphing over something. To find out, I paired the most feminine trope in European art history with the most masculine American epic, Moby Dick.

Backwards and in Stiletto Boots appropriates the macho genre of hunting paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and opens it up to a female protagonist.

A Death of Sardanapalus is a revisionist history in which I reimagine the fall of the last Assyrian king, famously portrayed by Delacroix. In my reimagining, far from being passive victims, Sardanapalus's concubines are about to perform a coup de gras, without him suspecting a thing.

The Concert appropriates and marries two disparate art historical references, Titian's, The Flaying of Marsyas, and Barbara Kruger's, You Construct Intricate Rituals Which Allow You to Touch the Skin of Other Men. This piece seeks to probe the source and nature of our discomfort with the nude male body. In our culture, the male body is rarely displayed as an object of beauty. When it is, it is automatically described as "homo-erotic." To avoid our discomfort, male nudity must always be contextualized into a narrative of fighting, dying, struggling, or making. As Kruger says, "We construct intricate rituals," to allow us to appreciate the male form. There is no male equivalent to the beauty pageant.

This painting reacts to the John Berger quote: "Men act, women appear." This truism has been demonstrated in Western art countless times over the past two millennia. Second wave feminists, in particular Linda Nochlin, have expounded upon how Western art has turned women into passive objects of delectation. This is "settled case law," in my opinion, as in the opinion of most people. It is undeniable. However, the inverse of this truism has been little talked about...namely that Western art rarely allows the male figure to simply appear. The male figure, according to many art treatises, must always be active, virile, strong. The male body is valued for what it can do, not simply for what it is or how it appears. Among the few times the male figure is allowed simply to appear for aesthetic appreciation is when that male figure is dead or sleeping. Examples of this are Michelangelo's, Dying Slave, Girodet's, Endymion, any number of St. Sebastians and Pietas. This beautiful male nude is immobilized and dying, thus permitting him to express his aesthetic value for the first time.

This painting was inspired by a trio of young women I saw at Disneyland with their younger siblings as my wife and were taking our daughters there for the first time. These outfits are fairly true to what they wore, including the shoes. I found this a surprising wardrobe choice for many reasons, not the least of which was that the sacrifices made for a certain kind of self presentation would seem to negate their own experiential enjoyment of the setting. Yet, the act of conspicuous display and self invention seemed quite in keeping with the Disney ethos. I have found this kind of personal display to be much more common here in Arizona and California than my home state of Texas, and so I have given much thought to the implications of this cultural difference, especially because, as modest Midwesterner, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. As a well indoctrinated second wave feminist, this culture of display has challenged many notions I previously held, and the questions it has posed for me regarding personal freedom, societal expectations, gender equity, the male gaze, female empowerment, subject/object duality and the potential pleasures and pitfalls for both parties, have had a profound influence on the rest of the work in this series.