These pieces were done for the Viaduct Gallery art show: “Drive”

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When I think of the word drive I think of progress and I picture progress in my mind’s eye as not a graph with a line presenting itself flying upwards ever so slightly.  No, I think of explosive chaos and violent spiraling fire.

As as an illustrator I wanted to depict the word drive in it’s literal meaning.  Vehicles and horses come to mind, but as a painter I was exploring the metaphor of drive.  We as a species has come far from being subject to all things natural, then harnessing and finally taming our world that we are in such a control using science and our powerful drive.

Horses become a symbol in my pieces as our relationship to our world.  I worked in a way that I depicted what I did automatically or subconsciously.  I remember a few things that may have manifested in my work.  When there were the first few boxy vehicles that we would later call cars, there were still horse pulled carriages.  Even though we can fly everywhere now, olden time coal powered trains that was a symbol for the Industrial Age still probably exist today as a novelty in some museum or educational institution.  We can go into space and have solar power, but we are still drilling for petroleum.  There are still horse trails even in my crowded old neighborhood in San Diego and I marvel at being able to drive back to Des Moines in two whole days instead of dying in the plains or desert after months of traveling by horse (like the Oregon Trail).

Things don’t phase out neatly, there’s an overlap.  Such as in one kind of janky  (not Walmart) grocery store I frequent it’s swipe only for credit cards, in another (upper class) grocery it is the insert feature where it reads the chip, and a decent grocery store I like is transitioning from swipe to chip as it indicates on their card machine.

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1942 was considered history’s last cavalry charge where the Philippines scouts charged the Japanese invaders in ww2.  My friend’s father told us a story of a bomber blasting the cavalry unit and I picture horse and human parts in the air at the time where the Industrial Age was used to create it’s deadliest machines.  I read an old article of wild horses being poisoned and shot someplace in Wyoming.  These are the creatures that moved civilization in North America around at one point and because they have lost their use as vehicles were being murdered.  I suppose I wanted to say everything and not and keep the rest for the viewer.  The human drive is wonderful in it’s reach and can also be terribly costly; however, one thing is for certain: our drive moves us on.