Painting

I did these paintings late 2019. Just before COVID dropped the next year. I had been looking for a specific image from my childhood memory from one of my brother’s Aircraft magazines. It was a fuzzy spy/reconnaissance type photo of a MIG 25 prototype. It was black and white taken from below and this thing just seemed to loom out of the sky ominously. It looked scary, otherworldly and threatening. It was like the first time you see the shark come up through the water while Roy Schneider is chumming in Jaws. This would have been in the 80’s when there was a lot of fear and propaganda around Russian American arms and the threat of Nuclear War. I was also thinking about Laurie Anderson’s Oh Superman and the lyric ‘Here come the planes’. I wondered what that might look and feel like in the context of conflict and being a civilian on the ground as these things emerged out of the sky. I worked on these paintings obsessively and they went through a lot of treatments from graphic to impressionistic to expressive but ended with something that seemed to carry what I was looking for.