Female Flatworm Amazon Guardian

Female Flatworm Amazon Guardian completed in 1999 is a vertical diptych. I first completed the bottom half in a very clean style around 1994 or so. In 1999 I added the top half or 'head' of the painting. I also create a rough, worn look to the painting to convey a certain wear and tear (I'll explain the analogy further down), along with small inner-drawings throughout the character's body and head.

The idea of this painting is about women, and the role woman have played and been subjected to all throughout history including our own present day. Women throughout history in various cultures have been the victims of oppression and violence, yet still are the archetypes of grace and beauty. The bottom half is a display of the female form, the part artist and poets have always glorified, the part men usually focus on. The top half of the painting acts as a peephole, showing a glimpse of the part of women that has been subject to oppression and abuse, offering a look at the collective mirror that time has a hold of, as in the book The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I've included a sketch on the female figure's body of a young boy listening to a father, as the father passes on the idiotic idea of mans dominance of woman, of subjecting them to harsh treatment, making them feel like second class citizens. Men pass on this illogical idea of a woman’s inequality to boys, mostly through example. Western religions perpetrate this absurd idea, which is why the father in the small sketch has a halo over his head. I also show an illustration on the woman’s head of a young lady coming to this realization, of her imposed inequality. Even today, here in the US I see men treating their girlfriends or wives not as a partner but as a type of subtle servant.

The Amazon guardian in the artwork stands as a symbol for the courage, the will and timeless persistence that woman throughout history have kept, that idea in the back of their mind (and sometimes right in the front for everyone to see), that they are not second class, they are not servants to be belittled, but they are the mothers of humanity, the archetypes of beauty and grace, despite some mens actions of arrogance and ignorance.

I sold this to a great person in New Mexico who has bought a number of my paintings.