The idea of the enchanted forest reaches back through time and across many cultures.  It is a place that compels us and draws us in, even as it threatens.  It offers hidden secrets, rich rewards, and mysterious beauty if we are brave or foolish enough to enter.  Inside its depths, we must confront our greatest fears, our darkest desires and our own mortality.

“Into the woods” is a series of paintings that explore the mysteries of the forest. The jumping off point for “Into the woods” is taken from Dante’s Inferno, Canto XIII. In this canto, Dante is lead by Virgil through the wood of the suicides where the souls of the dead have been transformed into trees.  A snap of a twig is pain and torture.  As he leaves the wood, Dante gathers fallen leaves from the earth and gives them back to one of the trees.  It is this gesture, a communication between the living and the dead using the medium of the natural world, that I wish to explore.

The paintings of “Into the woods” do not draw directly from traditional imagery of Dante’s Wood of the Suicides or any other mythology of the forest.  Instead, I seek to develop a new iconography that suits the reality of our modern world – a world where the relationship of man to nature has been turned upside down.

In “Inferno,” Dante is a powerless observer of nature and death, but today it appears that it is man who holds the power over nature and not the reverse. Mankind is responsible for what until very recently seemed unthinkable: poisoning the vast oceans, melting the giant glaciers, destroying parts of the blanket of ozone that protects the earth, and developing the means to control the genetics of plants and animals. The myriad traditional mythologies surrounding the theme of “man vs. nature” no longer apply.

“Into the woods/Nature vs. Man” seeks to interpret the new dichotomy of nature and man by exploring traditional themes and mythologies and turning them inside out and upside down.  Ultimately, it is a series of paintings about upheaval, violent reversal, calamity, change and (if we are lucky) catharsis.