Before I share stories about the paintings in my
Beatles collection, I want to first say a few words about the reason I paint
celebrities and entertainers like The Beatles, Johnny Depp, Steven Tyler as well as flags hearts and images like that. Simply put, it’s because I’m interested, just like you, in popular
culture and classical brands like flags and celebrities.
Pop art has been around since the
1950s. You remember Andy Warhol, right? He’s the New York artist who became
famous for mass-producing paintings, prints and silkscreens of Campbell soup
cans and Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and even Chairman Mao. Another New York artist, Jasper
Johns, painted American flags. Robert Indiana painted the word love in all
capital letters. Jim Dine painted a series of hearts. Robert
Rauschenberg incorporated images of JFK into many of his prints. And today,
photographer Chuck Close creates hyper-real images of
celebrities like Brad Pitt and Cindy Sherman, blemishes and all.
Each of these artists used their own unique
style and media to create pop art images, and so do I. But for me, it’s more
about the emotions I feel when I think about and paint these popular images.
That’s because I'm not merely reproducing or mass producing images on a piece of
cardboard, canvas or a wooden door. Each celebrity, each flag, each of my heart
paintings or Love Letters uniquely expresses my personal and internalized
feelings about the subject I convey. 
Sometimes the emotion I’m expressing is nostalgia,
as is true of the Beatles series. At other times, it’s love of country and the patriotism
that courses through my veins, as is evident in my series of American flags. On
other occasions it may be love or sympathy for people who are battling cancer. And I express these emotions
or moods by means of the brushstrokes or handstrokes I use and the color
palette I choose. I’ll explain more in the next few blogs as I tell you about the individual paintings in the Beatles series I told you about in yesterday’s blog.
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