Forgive Us Wherein We Fail Thee
My father prayed before every meal and always ended with the same words: Forgive us wherein we fail thee. He was born on a small farm in Bradford, Tennessee to parents whose lives were shaped by faith, hard labor, and a specific understanding that men were meant to be stoic, self-sufficient, and anchored in the belief that diligence would be rewarded. That understanding formed the bedrock of his identity. It also became the fault line along which his life eventually cracked.
I was a therapist for many years before becoming a full-time artist. I spent my career sitting with people whose private suffering could not be understood without understanding the structures that produced it. Economic precarity is not just economic, but psychological, relational, and spiritual as well. It shapes the stories people tell about who deserves what, and who is to blame. I watched that process unfold in my own father long before I had clinical language to name it.
When his union job began disappearing a little at a time through layoffs and eventually plant closure, he was one of the lucky ones to be able to “retire” early, but not before having years of stress over his job being outsourced. His job and his anxiety about it was an almost never-ending conversation in our home. He later found another job that allowed him to work until he was 65. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild maps this interior landscape with precision: communities where the promise of dignified labor has been broken, where working-class men find themselves adrift from the identities that once sustained them, and where real pain, unacknowledged and unaddressed, hardens into anger and misdirection. My father's story fits her portrait closely. What began as legitimate grief became resentment, disorientation, and withdrawal. The man who had once prayed for forgiveness eventually stopped extending it to others.
Understanding that trajectory does not excuse the harm it produced. In many cases that harm travels downward and sideways, toward immigrants, racial minorities, women, and others navigating the same structural pressures with less insulation. Systems that depend on division require exactly this misdirection. My father's anger, like his grief, was real. What resulted is also real. This series holds both of those things, and refuses to let either one cancel the other out.
The surfaces of the pieces in this series are dense with accumulation: handwritten sermon notes, newspaper fragments, paint, collage, graffiti, text that can almost but not quite be read. This layering is not just decorative. It reflects the layers and depth of the subject I am addressing. It accrues in a body, a household, a community, layer upon layer, until the original wound is buried under the weight of everything that followed. The illegibility is intentional. Some things cannot be fully excavated. That is part of what the work is about.
The titles, Creator and Destroyer, Ruling Over Paradise, Nothing But Blood Will Satisfy, Factory Man, place ordinary men inside theological and mythological frames they may not have chosen and could not escape. These were men shaped by an ideology of heroic self-sufficiency that the actual conditions of their lives could not support.
The visual composite includes the formal structures of European devotional painting from the 13th through 17th centuries, images of sacrifice, intercession, worthiness, and grace, fused with American vernacular photography, street art, and the layered surface logic of collage. The old devotional masters understood that private suffering and public structure are not separate domains. What happens inside a family is inseparable from what happens inside an economy. What happens to a body is inseparable from what happens to a culture. By placing that visual tradition in direct conversation with the psychological and structural forces of contemporary American life, the series holds together the intimate and the systemic, the personal and the political, the spiritual and the economic.
Bruce Springsteen spent much of his career trying to understand his own father, a man whose silence, isolation, and untreated anguish were inseparable from the conditions of his labor. Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain / I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain. That is not nostalgia. It is observation rendered as lament. The work that gave his father life also took his hearing.
My father's story has the same architecture. I watched his decline over many years, first emotional, then physical, then cognitive as Lewy Body Dementia gradually dismantled what remained. That disease added a particular cruelty to the reckoning. Watching a man shaped by ideology also unmade by neurology raises questions that resist easy resolution. Where does choice end and compulsion begin? Where does culture end and biology begin? Where does accountability end and compassion begin? Any chance of direct reconciliation died when he did, in 2016.
I do not romanticize him or his generation. We disagreed profoundly about fairness and human worth, and those disagreements had consequences. But I have come to understand his suffering as something more than personal failure, as shaped by systems that extract labor, erode stability, and channel the resulting rage away from those systems and toward more vulnerable targets. That is not a story that belongs to a single political framework. It is a story about what emotional illiteracy costs individuals, families, and a democracy that depends on citizens capable of tolerating complexity and extending recognition across difference.
The works in this series are not resolved. They are not meant to be. They hold grief and anger together and ask whether the devotional impulse, the willingness to look unflinchingly at suffering and to refuse despair, still has a place in a culture that has largely abandoned the vocabulary that once sustained it.
My father's prayer holds both contrition and hope. It does not demand innocence. It does not pretend the failure didn't happen. It refuses to let the failure be the final word. In the space between honest reckoning and the refusal of despair, something like repair becomes imaginable, not the erasure of what divided us, but the slow, difficult work of seeing one another clearly enough to begin again.
That work is what this series is for.
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PROCESS STATEMENT
Each work in this series is a one-of-a-kind mixed-media piece built through a process that moves between the digital and the physical. I begin by constructing a collage digitally, drawing on as few as seventy-five and as many as several hundred photographs. The photographs are my own, from my family's archive, and supplemented where necessary by a small number of images from the public domain. Once the digital collage is resolved, I print it across multiple sheets of paper that have already been weathered, textured, and painted. In some works I distress and tear these printed sheets further, reconfiguring the fragments on prepared boards layered with handmade paper, additional acrylic paint, and various artist mediums. Every finished work is mounted on aluminum composite panel and varnished, giving the pieces both physical permanence and a surface that holds the accumulated weight of the process visibly intact.
Factory Man, 84” x 100”, digital mixed-media ( acrylic paint, paper, print ),
Cell towers, factories, and farms crowd the background of this work, mapping three successive economic orders onto a single landscape: agricultural society, the industrial age, and the coming information economy. Each transition promised progress. Each one delivered something different to the rural communities that bore its costs. The central figure stands with the posture of a man in command of his world. Behind the confidence is shame, confusion, and an anger without a clear object. The factories and farms surrounding him are his past and, though he cannot yet accept it, his future. The fence in the foreground, while a staple of rural farms, also stands as a symbol that He will not escape this life.
Modern Man in Contemporary Society, 48" x 60", digital mixed-media (acrylic, spray paint, paper, print), 2020
Television did not reach rural West Tennessee until the 1950s. Those who were there remembered it vividly for the rest of their lives: standing outside a neighbor's window in a crowd too large to fit inside, watching a boxing match through the glass. Within a generation, the set that had been a communal wonder became a constant domestic presence, running from morning until the family went to sleep.
What came through that screen changed everything. With this technology came images of a country in upheaval: civil rights marches, women's protests, labor actions, a world reorganizing itself around values that felt foreign and threatening to many in the rural communities watching from their living rooms. This unease was further fueled by the expansion of 24 hour news services. This was a complex relationship, however. Television brought the disturbance into the house, but it also offered a way out of it. Westerns, sports, and gospel singing provided comfort and escape, a counter-programming of familiar certainties against the disorienting flood of change.
The man in this piece sits almost paralized while the wall of screens behind him shows a world that he cannot or will not join or accept. The book on the table beside his chair is Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, the same text that helped me understand my own father's disorientation, and the disorientation of a generation of men for whom the world arrived as spectacle rather than invitation.
Field of Martyrs, 60" x 84", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
A child stands in a field of crucified family members. The crosses that hold them are utility poles, the infrastructure of an industrial economy pushing into the rural South, carrying electricity and telephone wire and all the progress and disruption that followed. They are caught between two worlds, the agrarian culture they were born into and the modernizing forces that have arrived.
The figures were brought to this place by a belief system that was harsh, unforgiving. Their faith that might have offered grace instead delivered judgment. The codes it produced shaped how these men and women worked, how they loved, how they failed, and what they passed on to the children.
The child at the center of the field has not yet been crucified, but there is an empty cross in the background informing us of the possibility or probability.
The work pays loose tribute to Lazaro Pardo de Lago's Franciscan Martyrs of Japan (1630), a devotional painting in which martyrdom is rendered with formal beauty and theological certainty. While the beauty is gone, the certainty is there, but with a different ideology. I wanted this piece to be spare with the rawness coming into focus as poles, the figures, the child, and the blood-red field stretching in every direction.
Another Triangle, 42" x 60", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
In Buddhist psychology, the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is inhabited by beings consumed by rage and unsatisfied desire. They pursue gratification for needs whose moment has long passed, and the pursuit itself deepens the emptiness it was meant to fill. The more aggressively they chase what they lack, the less they find. It is a portrait of compulsion, and it is not unfamiliar.
Religion has traditionally offered one answer to this condition: withdraw from erotic, aggressive, or egotistical states of mind and replace them with devotion, humility, and piety. This is an ancient practice and not without wisdom, but it leaves the underlying need unaddressed and therefore undiminished. Suppression is not resolution.
This work holds that tension in a triangular composition. The central figure stands between a wife and a possible lover, both of whom are literal presences and metaphorical ones. The lover represents the chase for gratification that cannot be satisfied. The wife represents the stoic devotion that does not reach the wound either. Neither offers what the man actually needs, because what he needs can not be satisfied from external sources.
In Jungian psychology birds carry a specific freight. In Jungian psychology are understood as messengers traveling between the conscious and unconscious worlds, between what is known and what is not conscious.
Any Normal Childhood, 60" x 54", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
The child rides a tricycle across an open field. He is dressed in a suit, which adds to the seriousness and unusualness . The sky behind him is ominous. A death mask is on the ground behind him. The words Be Aware are written in the foreground.
The work takes its loose inspiration from Frida Kahlo's Girl in a Death Mask (1938), in which a child wearing a skull face stands in a field of flowers on the Day of the Dead. Kahlo understood that childhood and mortality are not opposites.
The suit, the tricycle, the open field, the death mask, the warning written where the child cannot see it, all present something that is not a normal childhood. One of the matriarahs stands and watches what she has helped construct. What is present instead is the atmosphere in which a particular kind of adulthood is formed, one in which the ominous is so constant it becomes invisible.
Is God Dead and Other Social Issues, 74" x 60", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
I represented the man in this piece as shirtless, which is both vulnerabe and defiance. He is unprotected, but he holds his ground. His western hat is the one thing he will not put down. It carries the mythology he was raised inside: the self-made man, the independent spirit, the cowboy who needed nothing and no one. The television behind him plays an image of a cowboy, reinforcing the vision of America he is clinging to even as the world outside the living room makes that vision increasingly untenable. A clock positioned in front of the screen tells us that time is running out.
The television has an image, a well-known photograph from the 1960s of a civil rights protester being attacked by a counter-protester wielding an American flag as a weapon. The flag turned instrument of violence. It was a specific moment from a specific decade, but anyone looking at this image now will recognize that the struggle it documents has not resolved. The decades have changed, but much in our culture has not
On the floor beside his chair lie four books: Time Magazine's landmark 1966 issue asking Is God Dead, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alan Watts' Taboo, and The Autobiography of a Yogi. These represent the challenges to his religious certainty and all that he believes about himself and others. He sees his faith questioned, violence in the streets, and new identities and ideas rising to displace everything he was taught was permanent and true. During my father's early and middle adulthood, the world appeared to him to be coming apart. He was afraid. He was confused. He was angry. He feared losing his factory job to outsourcing, to cheap labor across a border that was itself becoming a symbol of everything he felt slipping away.
The floor beneath his feet is a photograph I took of Mexican tile in a cathedral in Oaxaca. He is standing on what he fears without knowing it.
Prior to recent political developments it might have been possible to read this image as a portrait of the past, a document of anxieties that had since been resolved. I do not think anyone would read it that way now. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild examines the thought and feeling of rural working-class communities on the American right, explaining with rigor and empathy what appears to outside observers as people voting against their own interests, their anti-government anger, their racial resentments, their fear of environmental regulation. She does not defend these positions. She tries to make them legible, because legibility is the precondition of any genuine engagement. Her account reads like a transcript of conversations I heard throughout my childhood in rural West Tennessee.
The Mississippi minister and civil rights activist Will Campbell understood something similar from a different direction. Yale educated and deeply committed to the movement, he nonetheless began speaking directly with Klansmen and others who were violently opposed to everything he stood for. He was widely criticized for it within the civil rights community. His position was simple: you do not change people through hate. He was credited with turning at least one man who had been planning the bombing of a synagogue into a prison minister after he had served his own sentence. Campbell and Hochschild are not making the same argument, but they are circling the same truth. Understanding is not absolution. It is the only available beginning.
Leaving Home, 78" x 60", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
Thomas Hovenden's Breaking Home Ties (1890) is one of the most popular paintings ever shown at a World's Fair, which. It depicts a farm family on the morning a son leaves home, the mother's grief, the father's resignation, the young man's conflicted face. It was beloved because it was recognized. The leaving and the distress surrounding it is universal.
This work takes that scene as its point of departure. The family here occupies the same emotional geography: a multigenerational farm, a traditional and deeply religious household, a son who must go and knows what he is losing by going. The distress is shared. No one in this image is certain that leaving is the right decision, even though staying may not be possible.
For many in rural communities, leaving was an economic necessity rather than a choice. The great northern industrial cities offered wages the rural South could not match, and men went, to Detroit and Chicago and Cincinnati, earning money in factories and foundries while remaining alien to the culture around them and aching for the one they had left. The distance was not only geographical. It was everything: food, speech, pace, faith, the particular texture of a life organized around land and kin and a community that had known your family for generations.
That ache had consequences. The pressure from families to come home was constant and often decisive. Men who might have built lives and careers elsewhere took lesser jobs closer to home, trading opportunity for proximity, accepting a diminished version of their working lives in exchange for the comfort of familiar ground. It looked like loyalty. It was also loss. My father was no different, leaving home to have a well paying job only to succumb to his family's pressure to return home. He took a job in the warehouse for a third of the pay he was making and into a job he hated and hated himself for taking.
The pressure to remain is not particular to rural or working-class communities. It moves across every culture and class, from urban professional families to isolated farm towns. Deferring one's dream for the sake of belonging is a nearly universal human experience. What this series asks is what happens when that sacrifice is neither acknowledged nor honored, when a man gives up the life he might have lived and receives nothing in return but the slow erosion of the one he stayed for.
Love in a Crowded Place,48" x 30", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
Where the companion piece shows the couple inside a recognizable domestic world, this work moves in closer. The couple emerge from a dense field sermon fragments, torn paper, religious iconography, the word STOP and the phrase Simple Sermons. You can actually see the noise and chaos behind the framed pictures on the wall now. This is the world this relationship has always lived inside.
The couple is close but not entirely at ease. They exist together inside a world that speaks constantly and at cross purposes, that offers Simple Sermons for wounds that were never simple, that says STOP without explaining what needs to stop or who needs to stop it. The religious imagery pressing in from every direction, while meant, in part, as comfort was more for instruction, judgment, and expectation, and it shaped this relationship as surely as anything the two people brought to it themselves.
Seen together, the two works tell the same story from different distances. One lets you see the whole room. The other puts you inside it. What looks manageable from a distance turns out, up close,
Love and Delusion, 60" x 42", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
The couple moves through a crowded world without fully seeing it. She is blinded by love. He is blinded by a lack of insight into himself and everything he carries. Neither of them are conscious of what they are walking into together.
The chaos surrounding them is the actual content of the marriage they are about to make. His mother and grandmother are there, overbearing presences whose expectations will shape the domestic world for decades. Religious edicts crowd the frame, the inherited judgments and prohibitions of a faith tradition that will continue to govern what is allowed and what is not long after either of them has thought carefully about whether they believe it. Other women are present too, representing the patterns of pursuit and avoidance that will surface and resurface throughout the life ahead.
They do not see any of this yet. That is what the title means. Love is real here. So is the delusion they know each other and what they are about the create.
Ruling Over Paradise, 78" x 60", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
The composition is loosely drawn from Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine. He is holding a small animal with the ease of someone accustomed to being in charge. Here the ermine has been replaced by a goat. The goat is agricultural society, the world he is from. It is also slang for someone who has fallen from favor. And in the Biblical tradition that shaped his interior life, it is a figure of evil, the animal separated from the sheep on the day of judgment and sent to the left hand of God. He holds it anyway.
The floor beneath him is a photograph I took of Mexican tile in a cathedral in Oaxaca. As the rural South shifted from agriculture to industry, factory work became the foundation of working-class income and in some cases the route to something resembling middle-class stability. What many did not know, or knew too late, was that the foundation was already being negotiated away. Industry owners discovered they could move the factories to Mexico for cheaper labor, or use the threat of doing so to suppress wages at home. The floor this man stands on with such confidence is the very thing that will be pulled from under him.
The framed image visible in the background is a twelfth century mosaic from the Basilica of Monreale: Adam Rules Over Paradise. It represents a world in which the dominion of a certain kind of man over everything around him was assumed. That world is what this man inherited as his birthright. The clock positioned nearby tells us that time is running out on the inheritance.
The halo is ironic but not entirely. These men believed in their own centrality with a conviction that was partly delusion and partly the sincere expression of a culture that had told them, in every register available, that they were right to.
Baptism: Nothing But Blood Will Satisfy, 76" x 84", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
As a young man, just married, my father decided God had called him to become a minister. This lasted only a few months. After my father died I found a small spiral notebook filled with his handwritten sermon notes. Almost all of it focused on sin, punishment, and forgiveness. Page after page of a man trying to get the accounting right, to understand what was owed and whether it could ever be fully paid. One sentence stood out from everything else: Nothing But Blood Will Satisfy Holy Law.
He had written it down because it mattered to him from his earliest baptism until the day he died, carrying with him an obsessive and unrelenting worry about whether he had been forgiven, whether the debt had been settled, whether the blood had been enough. The faith that was meant to offer him release became instead another form of the burden he could never fully put down.
His sermon notes move through this image. They decorate the minister's scarf. They inhabit the water he is being lowered into, the water that was supposed to wash everything away. The words are present at the moment of his cleansing, which is another way of saying the anxiety never left the room even when grace was supposed to be entering it.
In the background his father and grandfather stand watching. They are stoic and unmoved. They have already been through this. They know what the water does and does not do, but they believe anyway. They are not offering comfort. They are simply there, as they always were, as the tradition itself always was: present, unyielding, and asking more than any man could comfortably give.
The image is not a critique of faith. It is a portrait of what faith costs when it is organized entirely around unworthiness. A man who spends his life worrying whether he has been forgiven is a man who never quite believed that he deserved to be.
The Box Loader, 60" x 42", digital mixed-media (acrylic paper, print)
In Buddhist psychology the Hell Realm is not a place of eternal punishment administered from outside. It is a state of mind in which anxiety and rage are experienced as forces beyond the self's control. The person inside it is genuinely suffering. What they cannot see is that the suffering is being generated from within. The torturer and the tortured are the same person.
The man in this image loads boxes onto trucks. He has done it all day. He will do it again tomorrow. He hates the work and he hates what it says about him, or what he believes it says about him, which is that he ended up somewhere beneath where he deserved to be. The product of his succumbing to return home for this job. The blame moves in every direction: outward toward the system, the bosses, the government, his mother, the cultural forces he cannot name but feels displacing him and inward toward himself. His rage keeps shifting because he never fully understands himself.
The boxes are literal and they are not. Each one carries : anxiety, fear, financial worry, sexual thoughts he cannot integrate, paranoia, the inability to make sense of a country changing faster than he can follow, religious rigidity that forecloses rather than opens, family wounds that were never spoken about and therefore never healed. These are the boxes he loads and unloads every day alongside the physical ones. The difference is that the physical boxes eventually get delivered somewhere. The others simply fall, and accumulate, and fall again.
The composition makes this visible. Boxes cascade around him in every direction, rising above him and falling at his feet. The weight never go anywhere. He lifts and loads.
Creator and Destroyer, 54" x 42", digital mixed-media (acrylic, spray paint, paper, print)
My father is the central figure in the composition, which is accurate to how he occupied space in life. His forceful nature, his depression, and his addiction dominated the household and were the force around which everything else arranged itself. The mother stands slightly apart, arms folded, showing both her determination and her resignation. The child at the edge of the frame is taking in what the adults do not appear to see.
Behind them the infrastructure of industrial America crowds the horizon: power lines, water towers, smokestacks. At their feet lies the debris of a life that was built and also broken by the same pair of hands.
He created this family, held it together through decades of work and faith and the particular stubbornness of a man who believed that showing up was the same thing as being present. He also damaged it, through misdirected anger, withdrawal, addiction, and the emotional distances that accumulated over years into something the family learned to navigate around rather than through.
The NO IDLING sign visible in the middle distance reads like an instruction handed down from his parents, who believed that if one was not working or reading the Bible, one was wasting the time God had given. The television already present among the rubble at his feet suggests that the noise was always there, mediating between him and the life directly in front of him. As a quiet acknowledgment of everything churning beneath the surface, Freud's partial face appears on the screen.
The sky behind the family is the deep bruised red that moves through much of this series. It is the color of distress or warning. This is a backdrop they are all familiar with.
A Mother's Sacrifice, 64" x 38", digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
A woman holds her son above her head in the darkness, arms raised, offering him upward. She is giving him to God, to the faith, to the specific set of beliefs and prohibitions and certainties that have organized her own life and that she will now organize his around. She is not intentional cruel. It is her understanding of the world, and she is telling him how she believes a person can be good. Work hard. No idling. Read the Bible. And always understand that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness.
She is sacrificing him while believing she is saving him. His mental and emotional life will be shaped by everything she is about to teach him: the theology of unworthiness, the obsessive accounting of sin and forgiveness, the emotional stoicism that mistakes silence for strength, the rigid certainties about who deserves what and what God requires. These are not incidental lessons absorbed at the edges of childhood. They are the architecture of the self he will spend his life inside, and in many ways never leave.
The image is conceived as a devotional icon. The vertical format, the figure emerging from near total darkness, the upraised arms, the frontal stillness of her stance: these are the visual properties of Byzantine and early Renaissance icons, objects historically understood as sacred windows rather than mere representations. She is not depicted as a villain. She is depicted as a believer, which is a more difficult and more honest thing to hold.
This is happening at the edge of a harvested cotton field, at night. Crosses stand in the background. One has fallen. That fallen cross is the image's quiet admission that something in what she is offering may already be compromised.
The handwritten sermon text along the bottom edge draws from the tradition of Mexican ex-voto paintings, small devotional works created in gratitude for divine intervention in moments of crisis. Gratitude will be something mostly missing from all of their lives.
Contemplation, digital mixed-media ( acrylic, spray paint, paper, print ) 2019
Contemplation, digital mixed-media ( acrylic, spray paint, paper, print ) 2019
Knowing One's Place, digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
The primary women of my father's childhood were strict, angry religious fundamentalists for whom the boundary between sin and damnation was short and clearly marked. Idleness was the devil's work. Failure to study the Bible was the devil's work. Much of ordinary life, the desires and confusions and needs of a child growing into a person, fell on the wrong side of that boundary. Hell was not an abstraction. It was the destination waiting for anyone who did not hold the line.
The two women stand together with the stillness of figures who have always known exactly where they belong and exactly what they believe. They are matriarchs, and in the rural community where my father grew up, that word carried specific and considerable weight. Women whose access to career, education, and independence was severely limited nonetheless exercised a profound authority inside the household and the community around it. My grandmother, his mother, left school after the third grade to work in the fields. What she knew, she knew completely. What she believed, she transmitted without qualification.
The image is conceived as an icon, deliberately mimicking the devotional figures one encounters in a cathedral: frontal, still, authoritative, larger than their surroundings in ways that have nothing to do with physical scale. In the iconographic tradition such figures are not portraits of individuals. They are embodiments of principle, windows into a sacred belief system that precedes and outlasts any particular person. That is precisely how these women functioned in my father's formation.
The NO visible on the figure holding the Bible was perhaps the word most consistently available to him in childhood, applied to desire, to curiosity, to anything that threatened the order these women understood themselves to be maintaining on God's behalf.
In the background two structures stand in quiet proximity. On one side a sign advertises nude dancing down by the lake. On the other side a church. They are closer together than either institution would care to acknowledge. That proximity is the image's most precise biographical detail. Sexuality was among the things most thoroughly condemned in my father's formation and most persistently present in his interior life. As Jung noted years ago, that is most forcefully prohibited does not disappear. It goes underground, where it becomes something harder to manage and more damaging in its effects than it might have been had it ever been met with anything other than the word NO. The two women in the foreground preached against everything that sign represents. The sign remained. The church remained. And the distance between them, which was supposed to be absolute, turned out to be the space in which a life was quietly unmade.
Seen together with the preceding two works, these three images form a group portrait of the women who shaped the interior life of a man the rest of this series tries to understand. They are not villains. They were themselves formed by the same system they transmitted, limited by it even as they wielded it.
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BELOW
Looking Toward a Possible Future, digital mixed-media (acrylic paint, paper, print)
This is where the series begins, though it is placed at the end. A boy stands at the edge of a harvested cotton field at the threshold of whatever comes next. Behind him the rural house holds the two women who have shaped everything he believes about himself and the world.
He is looking toward the road, but he cannot leave. Too many restrictions, too much guilt to go. A good man stays at home and denies himself. In the future he will leave, but will bow to the pressure to return home to family.
The cotton field between him and the road has been harvested. The ground is depleted and holds no promise for the near future.
In the background utility poles stand along the horizon. They appear here before they appear anywhere else in the series. In Field of Martyrs those same poles will become crosses, the infrastructure of industrial America transformed into the instrument of a generations long martyrdom alongside the belief system that also martyrs him. For now they are still only poles, only the ordinary machinery of a modernizing world pushing into the rural South.
The road may be the saddest part. Knowing it can lead away, physically or metaphorically, to a different place and a different future. And the poles that will define his fate are already standing behind him in the field he has not yet left, visible to us, invisible to him, waiting with the patience of things that do not need to announce themselves because they are already in place.
The two women remain at the house. They are the icons of his formation, frontal and still and absolute in their certainty. They are reminders and also anchors
