Essays and images of work in the Loomings series of paintings in tar.

Loomings is named after the first chapter of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. The series with its allusive materials (tar and gold leaf) likens our insatiable extraction of fossil fuels to the self-destructive voyage of Ahab's doomed commercial whaling vessel, the Pequod.

The tar I use is toxic waste left over from the refinement of petroleum oil - the successor to whale oil, which literally greased the wheels of the industrial revolution. The work recalls 19th century American photography, painting, and literature while gesturing toward the unrelenting burning of fossil fuels driving ecosystem collapse and threatening our very existence as a species.


I see Moby Dick as deeply critical of American materialism and humanity’s hubristic will to dominate nature. The meta-narrative of Moby-Dick works to question the industrial project of a nation driven by subjugation and extraction of earth’s natural resources (and other human beings) to be measured off, excavated, and sold to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Melville’s novel undermines the Enlightenment sense of “civilized” man’s order and place within the universe that American capitalism adopted as justification for its shameful foundational sins - “Darwinian” individualism and competition, the violent appropriation of indigenous land, and above all the enslavement of human bodies for profit and imperial empire building, which continues less visibly, but no less viciously, today.