Killing Floor, 24" x 18", oil and assemblage on canvas, 1996. Artist's collection.

Painting intuitively, as I do, means that one does not edit the nature or severity of thought one brings to the image. In turn, if I am to exhibit a meaningful retrospective of my work I have to be responsible and exhibit this grim little number for which the jocular visual asides, and conceptual ironies are completely absent.

The scene in this painting is as surreal as the aftermath of a neutron bomb explosion. The neutron bomb is a form of weaponry that destroys all organic matter within the radius of its detonation, but it leaves the buildings and other inorganic structures intact.

The spooky aspects of this painting are the two-dimensional illusionistically painted areas, and the redemptive areas are the sculptural three-dimensional forms. The crimson square, crimson diamond form, the orange heart-shaped form, and the headless, handless, footless body form are all applied to the canvas in assemblage. Even the undulating pattern traversing the body form is in sculptural relief. The flat two-dimensional rendering of the architectural elements is obviously designed at such an angle as to direct the inhabitants of the composition off the picture plane, just as the floors of a slaughter house are angled so that the blood runs into a drain. While the sculptural elements are subject to the illusory command of the two-dimensional elements of the composition, they are physically affixed to the picture plane. There is an implicit visual/conceptual interplay between the hysterics of the two-dimensional rendering and the three-dimensional forms, which I believe distinguishes the aesthetically intriguing aspects of this composition from the vacuum of melodrama. It is as if the two-dimensional illusory rendering was a temporal or conditional mode of perception passing, however briefly, by the inextricably rooted sculptural forms. The moment is unmistakably real in its convergence of these disparate factors, but everything passes and every scene changes eventually.