Read this recent interview with Roni Feldman - This work depicts a collection of people holding candles, some in mourning and others in celebration. The colors are tuned and figures blurred so it becomes hard to tell where one crowd ends and the next begins. I apply the blurred, ethereal nature of airbrushed acrylic to paint multitudinous human features. As the ethereal figures blend into each other, I form tensions between individual and crowd, abstraction and representation. In my paintings, whirls of figures celebrate, mourn, protest, consume, dance, and embrace alongside others that drown, burn, and dissolve. My crowds evoke the power and ecstasy of unified intention alongside a potential descent into mob mentality. The compositions recall the idealistic pursuit of 1960's psychedelia, van murals, and other airbrush art forms, but in my work, airbrushed paint is like a thin veil that separates utopia and dystopia, civilization and chaos, agony and ecstasy.
