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The characterization of these fantastic works as "Urban Utopias' (maybe Urban-Suburban Utopias) is so accurate. They are a epitones of that time as well. They do proffer a happiness. Indeed, they come from and fit that period of American ebullience with its promise of a perfect happiness. The paintings are just gorgeous, with the grey sympathies and beams of bright tonalites in balance.

The allegory in his works can be compared to other works in that period:

To jump media, look at the films of Antonioni ,L'Avventura (1960), putting black & white juxtapositions between eternal essential values and flirtatious existential values. Frustrated and capricious young lovers are tormented by their impulses, while bonded older couples holding hands stroll along in the backgrounds, interrupted occasionally by orders of nuns marching through the scenes of disloyalties. One of the young women disappear on the adventure, and no one is quite sure whether she existed at all, and finally, care even less.

Antonioni broadened his essence/existence value portrait in the Passenger 1975. Can we recall the Actor Jack Nicholson sweating out the dysfunctional jeep in the blazing desert, cursing his fate rather than acknowledging his essential meaning. ?? The Passenger ends where he started, wiped out by his own misdeeds and inability to recognize his inherit merit.

To cross back to paintings in that 1955-1970 period , the Rothkos and Newmans mesmerize us with the suggestion of another dimension. They whisper of another realm of values, alluring the eye and spirit into another type of Allegory. The meanings in Vir Heroicus Sublimis are complex and inspirational; that Allegory appeals without condition. We are given a vision of a sublime certainty, solid as the square essense at its center.

The Rothkos entice and suggest a penumbral world that we can barely grasp, like those shadows on the cave walls that Plato sites as reflections of ultimate things, eternal values.

I write these cross references to show that other works of that period presented Allegories of full promise, displaying meanings that can bring participants into more wonderful lives. Such works differ from the existential struggles of identity in Kline and De Kooning, because the identity of their makers was felt sound BEFORE they started painting, rather than revealed or bungeled in the painting struggle, as Jack with his jammed-up jeep.

My studio is working to make pieces that reveal the essential glories of consciousness, the new wonders and beauty that we can perceive and know by digital means in our Virtual Era.

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