The Promised Land

Promised Land is a series of five landscape paintings, charcoal and pastel on paper. Of the five, one is a diptych composition. The collection is a continuation of an earlier collection of work titled 'Noah's Ark' which presented a distorted vision of modern society.

While all the titles in this series reference Biblical themes, I don't wish to allude to a particular Christian vision when I make these connections. I merely employ Christian religious allegory as a secular process of sociological inquiry into man's greed and ultimately annihilistic relationship with nature, or our 'Promised Land', as I see it.

Insatiable and directionless conquest to attain civilization is a harbinger of social chaos and revolution. It is a supremely ironical fact that we put warning labels with skulls on cigarette packets while human conflict decimates huge swathes of population in most parts of the world. We plant toxins in the soil and in the air.

Our symbiotic relationship with the elements of nature is askew. This series, however, is not so much an apocalyptic prophecy, as it is a bleak and tragic observation of human condition in the present day leading into the future. The use of heavy black only serves to accentuate the cataclysmic reality of society today. 'Promised Land' is an aesthetic comment on the radical, irreversible transformation of our reality seen as the mindscape of an observer.