Last year I began working on a new series of paintings that show the return of dinosaurs as they destroy and overrun our world. These works are allegories about many of the ecological and economic issues we face today. The resurrected dinosaurs represent the fossil fuels we have liberated from the ground, and their destructive violence mirrors the growing risks from climate change, environmental degradation, and mass extinctions. The underlying forces that have manifested these creatures are our ongoing addiction to oil, and the inherent dynamics of our capitalistic system. I call this painting series Late Capitalism.
These paintings originated from my nostalgia of childhood. My two primary obsessions as a young boy were cars and dinosaurs. These things were so cherished in my youth that it’s not surprising they inevitably found their way into my artwork as an adult. The dinosaurs I depict may not be up to date with current paleo-science, but they epitomize the book illustrations I remember seeing as a child, done by classic paleo-artists such as Charles R. Knight, Rudolph Zallinger, and Zdeněk Burian.
Charles Knight’s illustration of a Tyrannosaurus Rex
Charles R. Knight’s illustration of a T-Rex, shown above, inspired one of my recent paintings. I was enamored of how Knight had portrayed sunlight falling upon the dinosaur’s head. My painting would have a similarly posed T-Rex, standing heroically upon an immense pile of automobiles. In the distance would be the broken remains of a freeway. The cars and freeway would represent our fossil fuel based society, while the dinosaur would be the retribution we have manifested from greedily pursuing this paradigm.
I blocked in my composition with a transparent wash of violet upon a yellow ground. Similar to Knight’s painting, I imagined the top of my T-Rex being dramatically lit, while everything else below would be in shadow. I left the sky area empty at this point, as I had not yet decided what would happen there.
I typically work from imagination, so It can sometimes be challenging to paint certain objects convincingly without visual reference. In this circumstance, I used some toy cars to help me paint the pile of automobiles. I would simply hold one of these scale models in my left hand, as I painted with my right. This allowed me to study the reference model and gauge how the light would fall upon it.
Midway though painting my pile of vehicles, I decided to make a change. I realized that if I created two distinct hillsides of cars, one sunlit and one in shadow, the scene would have a greater sense of depth. Of course, this meant I had to reduce many of the cars I had already sketched in, so they would appear further in the distance. It took several days to paint all of these smaller cars. I made sure to vary the colors and arrangement of the pile so it would look consistently random. I also added a schoolbus near the base of the freeway. Schoolbuses are a motif I’ve previously used to refer to future generations of society. They will be most impacted by climate change.
I call this painting Hothead. The title obviously alludes to the hostile T-Rex before us, but also to the implied threat of a hotter world, suggested here by the strangely tinted sky.
Late Capitalism has already proven to be a very fruitful body of work. I have developed over thirty new paintings in the past year alone, and I have ideas for new projects all the time. I look forward to seeing how this series develops. Hopefully some day I will have an opportunity to exhibit this body of work all together, I think the work would be all the more powerful if viewed as a group. Until then, I’ll be stay busy painting in my studio.
