This new work came about through the happenstance of finding blank sheets of prison record forms while helping a friend clean out the offices of a printing company. The forms are sizeable at 17” x 28” and printed on 100% cotton Hampshire Bond and I found them well suited for creating ink drawings. I chose as my theme “missiles of the world”. I probably first used a missile as imagery in my work around 1996. This was in reaction to bombing that our country did in Iraq during the first Gulf War. I remember feeling a kind of shock at the reality that American weaponry was being employed and it seemed as though this was the first time since Vietnam.
Since that time this specific imagery has been sporadic in my work until now. I’m not sure exactly why missiles now, except that since 9-11 I have generally been creating anti-military art. I found a
website which catalogs every missile created in the world. On this website each missile is rendered as a simple schematic line drawing and accompanied by all its specs. As I randomly searched through this database I became understandably overwhelmed at the shear volume and technology behind these weapons and the glib nature of each design’s name such as walleye, bull pup and shillelagh. It became my mission to some how depict various missiles in the context of these prison forms.
image: "Nike Zeus" 17" x 28" (detail view) ink and gouache on paper 2005
