Walking out of the opening to a group show I was in, I thought: “I can never make a painting like that again”.

Grateful to be in the show (thank you, always) but feeling like my work not only didn’t fit but ran philosophically contrary to some of the other pieces, I had to ask myself: was what I thought I was doing not translating at all?

So the question train started: did I have too many ingredients, was my use of appropriation actually a crutch stopping me from going further with what I hoped to find or say, was I confused, was I being too careful and, worst of all to me at that moment, had I fallen into the trap of making art about art?

That ended my lifting faces from classical art.

Deciding to mine my roots and nerdiness again, a new series began by looking back to an idea I’d started to explore years ago but perhaps lost track of when trying to fit into what I thought I was supposed to do, rather than what I wanted to do.

Still interested in the fragile male ego, romantic foibles and the lifespan of ideas but wanting the work to be more about a feeling than a declarative sentence, a new set of evolving characters came up.

Disillusioned by what’s been, unsure of what’s next, I thought of them as the last of their kind, living in a haze at the end of time, surrounded by a mishmash of forgotten relics, objects and clothing, with no sense of what they mean.

Malick Sidibé’s portraits of people posing with their prized possessions, influencer content houses, trying for a new New Objectivity, questions about authorship and value if everything is everywhere for and from everyone all at once.

I went back to the feeling I had going into art school of wanting to do abstract real life comic books, enriched now with Turnstile, Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Sarah Ball, Nicole Eisenman, and 35 years of combining disparate images as a graphic designer, to see if I could build a larger, non-linear storyline around these characters as they figure themselves out.

An ongoing abstract narrative, felt not read, a film strip that takes on different potential meaning and emotion depending on what order each painting is placed in, interconnected pieces even if separated, the viewer picking up a moment within the story.

This is an ongoing series.