I started this series of paintings because I was thinking about the metaphors we use for male genitalia: sword, gun, drill, car.  These are all man-made objects – mechanical, metallic, cold  – which struck me as both odd and nonsensical.  Men are part of nature too – they are gooey, moist and dripping with life! Why shouldn’t a man look at his genitals and think, “I am a beautiful flower?”  

In my paintings, male genitalia is portrayed as fertile, flowery and delicate.  The images invoke softness, frailty and beauty.  In creating these works, I meditated often on the wisdom of bell hooks’ seminal book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love:

“Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity a boy learns.  He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male.  Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder…When a child learns that the way he organically feels is not acceptable…the boy learns to don a false self…[He learns] “I must find a way to be someone else-someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.”

bell hooks describes this “soul murder” as “the deepest cut” young boys experience. While my paintings are fundamentally playful, they seek to accomplish soul-feeding work: reimagining masculinity in life-giving and empowering ways.  They are hopeful works that imagine a braver future and a healing of the “deepest cut.”