El Politico

I got the images in an adventurous roundabout way via fax from Tucson pero ni modo. The big 4'x4' pic is an oil, acrylic, pastel, spray can stencil and monotype painting called El Politico. I started it in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, when on a Fulbright there in 96 and fine tuned and finished it in 98. The main image is of a PRI politician getting out of his car in that typically arrogant manner that priistas used to have before Fox put the scare on them. On either side of the painting is a typical vendedora in silhouette that I photographed at the Mercado San Isidro in the Comayaguela district of Tegucigalpa. The market burnt down a few weeks after the pic under mysterious circumstances, but that todo el mundo knows was the work of the merchants tired of the city's neglect of a dirt poor area. Layered underneath these images is a figure of one of your daily murder victims taken from the "acontecimientos" section of the newspaper. Comayaguela is where the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes is located, where I taught mural painting and where I always tried to split from before sundown so I wasn't caught in what is commonly called "the killing fields." A lot of contra weapons and munitions and poverty. The round ball on top of pic is taken from the Codex Borgia and is the sun and moon in equal portions of conflict and depicting bad news. Who knows what else I threw in there.

Women and War

The silkscreen of the 12 Women and War series used a pic I took of a black woman on Broadway in downtown LA that I think was a kinda emaciated hooker showing all the signs of chemical dependency, to put it kindly. Most of this series were taken from my photos of people on Broadway during the day. This particular one is ringed by a flechette type symbol also taken from the Codex Borgia and that seems to have a phallic base and that probably means power. Haven't really investigated the symbolism, just thought it looked chevre. The black and white stuff in the background are apliqued rub-offs of xeroxes using carburetor cleaner to transfer them. The one around her head is a 400% xerox blow-up (hence the large microdot half-tones) of a Huey gunship crew helmet. The image on left directly under her face is the coiled ammo feeder to the M-21 gun system, the famosa "Gatling." Great for crowd control of unruly peasants who don't want to pick export crops from IMF subsidized agribusinesses. These are used Vietnam-era machines, stored at Davis-Monthon AFB in Tucson for future sale to our client states at bargain basement prices. Seen it in Chiapas and the Old Pueblo. But good for keeping domestic retail prices down.