Egyptian Goddess

Egyptian Song (内观) 2000, oil on canvas, 36 × 36 in.

Inspired by a visit to the British Museum and the Louvre in 1997, this is an older, smaller painting, but it seems appropriate to current events!

It seems to me that the angst and fascination with the dark side of human nature that became so popular in modernist art since the First and Second World Wars are very much an affectation today. I think future generations will look back on our art and see a strangely morbid fascination for death, destruction, dissolution and deviancy that does not reflect the comfort and peace most of us enjoy. How many of us have experienced revolution, war or widespread disease or destruction? Instead I see beauty all around, healthy men and women, young people able to go to school, free of the political pressures I knew as a child. I am aware I live in a privileged society like most deviants with computers and broadband internet connections. I'm thankful for those blessings and that's why I paint beauty and light, and strive for wisdom, and dress my models in silk and gold. We are gods and goddesses, and sometimes, like the people of Egypt, it seems we can even control our own fates.