The Flood Cycle
A series of four 40″x40″ oil on canvas paintings produced for my 2013 show ‘Accumulation & Interruption’ in Austin, Texas. These paintings were painted simultaneously, using various ideas from religion, mythology and current trends in environmentalism and social critiques.
The four paintings are loosely based off the Greeks’ Stages of Man, which, minus the Heroic Age, stacks up like this:
The Golden Age: A peaceful time, with resources in great abundance, people lived long, happy lives.
The Silver Age: Men live a shorter time, begin to fight among themselves, and started to incur the wrath of the Gods
The Bronze Age: War became the purpose for men, everything became forged of bronze to mirror their hardened existence, this age ended with a great flood.
The Iron Age: Men are fraught with dishonesty and lies, humans feel no shame for their wrongdoings, and gods refuse to help men because there is no help against evil.
Align the four paintings above with those four stages and you’ll have a rough sense of the decomposition of man and nature that I wanted to achieve with these works. The Flood Cycle is not the brightest outlook, but a reflection of today combined with ancient myths.