Shadows & Ceremonies: Paintings

A series of 36 pencil drawings & 30 oil paintings celebrating masked African & New Guinea tribal ceremonial dancers and portraits of the faces behind the masks. (2001)

By the 1880's, the myths, the ceremonies, the cultures, the realities of the American indigenous people were all but a shadow of themselves to be lost forever in the memories of time. This sad twilight of a culture that was and now is no more is now upon us again in the central African continent. What was a vital part of our collective past, a mirroring of what was once our own collective history, will soon be gone. And, like all great wonders, it will soon live only as a part of the collective myth. Tragically this is happening only one hundred twenty years after the other great loss. What took hundreds of thousands of years to evolve, can now, and does, pass in a lifetime of one generation. And, so, we the living must witness the loss, this acceleration of tragedy, and we the survivors can only despair for our loss, to this human connection to our mother, the Earth, and the past that will be no more.