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ARTIST'S NOTE

While painting the neoclassical detailing of this homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I questioned the invasion of sanctuary. The spaceman, the legionary, is the forayer of today so different from epochs past and yet unborn? Solace and stupor, bread and circuses, the elaborate mythology we have made of change. The pod speaks to this age, our age, in which Otis’s veil—a Man who is quiet, is as secure in his House, as a Prince in his Castle—has become an anachronism.

 

Philip Roth described art, in his case the novel, as a trying spiritual exercise, requiring qualities that are alien to your moral makeup. The process can leave you feeling more like a sword-swallower than the ventriloquist you’d expected. You must use yourself harshly to reach what is, literally speaking, beyond you. The impersonator cannot indulge the ordinary human instincts that govern what we choose to reveal and what we choose to conceal.​