Tales of magic and enchantment, read to us as children by adults we love and trust, have served to entertain generations as well as to provide a source of implied moral instruction.  The characters in these fables and the fates they ultimately befell were intended to serve as examples of what we might expect when following a similar course of thought and behavior.  Although these tales often read as benign narratives, there is often a dark and disturbing quality just under the surface. Many of these so-called children’s stories are laced with implied themes of lust and sexual perversion, jealousy and obsession, power and control, punishment and violent death.  In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, for example, there are numerous innuendoes in reference to Wendy’s relationship with not only Peter, but also with her father, as well as Hook himself.

There is great potential for skewing a child’s view of the world when these tales become overly powerful as guidelines to reality.  A child can grow up believing that one is either always pure in thought and deed (the hero/heroine) or that one is wicked and unconscionable (the villain/villainess), and that there can be no overlapping.  There is, of course, a bit of hero and villain in each of us, but to a child who believes in these stories of extreme good and evil, even one impure thought can frighten him into thinking that he may indeed identify as the evil character and be doomed to suffer a fate commensurate to the one suffered in the tale.  Equally dangerous is the notion that if one strives to be obsessively pure and good, one will be cast as the heroine and ultimately be spared from evil to enjoy a “happily ever after”.  The existence of evil and injustice in one’s life, therefore, becomes a warning that one is not trying hard enough to be “good”.  The struggles that result from either of these notions can be life-long and monumental.

The figures in my paintings, though inspired by their fairytale counterparts, are portrayed in a harsh contemporary light, one in which they teeter on the brink of lost innocence.  In a pivotal moment, they are free to break the grip of enchantment, thereby empowering themselves to step out of the fairytale and into the real world.

My work is meant to provoke reinterpretation of these fictional stories, one in which the unexpected imagery inspired by the sub-themes of these classic fairytales force a darker, more anxious mood upon the viewer.  Notions of happy-ever-after are dispelled, and are replaced with more complex endings spun by the viewer himself.