Colorful Tombstones for Dead Ideas: Swan with Moons

There are five basic images in the series of ten paintings, but for some reason, I painted each one twice, so, with some variation there are ten pieces total. I like sculpture gardens and sculptures in fields and I had the idea that it would be fun to make sculptures out of old ideas and beliefs, the age-old constructs that, to my thinking, plague our culture and individual lives. People make sculptures that represent ideas, but here I was more interested in imagining that we could literally transform ideas whose shelf lives have gone stale (or are otherwise harmful) into actual objects to enjoy. In this way, the old constructs would be captured and put to rest, but also replenished. As I painted these pieces, while I came to think of the objects they feature — the “sculptures” — as playful renovations, I also thought something darker: the sense that these objects mark the end point for notions by which people have lived much of their lives, and that in this sense they are colorful tombstones for dead beliefs.