Poppy Hill/Sanjūsangen-dō, no. 1

"Poppy Hill"

The "Poppy Hill" series began in 2024 with paintings of cellular towers on a hill in Fairfield, CA, disguised (badly) as trees. They are joined by trees placed at historical sites in Kyoto and Nara, Japan, which I visited in March, 2024. These "real" trees, like the artificial cell phone tower trees, are planted and shaped by human hands to conform to human design; in some ways, they are contrived as well.

The cell phone trees are absurd but also rather charming -- a clumsy but laudable effort to make technology fit within the environment. Today, AI is poised to reshape -- indeed, violate -- the environment in fundamental ways. The art world's quaint 20th-century arguments about "authenticity" and "artificiality" are moot in the face of this onslaught. We are standing in a liminal space, the ground shifting beneath our feet -- as unrooted as the trees in these paintings.

Which tree is real and which is fake? Like Magritte's Treachery of Images, the "Poppy Hill" series is meant to remind the viewer that it doesn't matter; these are paintings, and paintings have always been a lie. As Felipe Dulzaides once told me at the San Francisco Art Institute, "art is a trick -- but it's an honest trick." In "Poppy Hill," I indulge in an honest trick, with California and Japan sharing the same artificial space.

But Magritte's painting was more than a playful Dada schtick. It was a warning: Beware the dishonest trick. The picture that swears up and down that it's not a lie. The magic machine that does your thinking for you. The lovely face in the pool that stares back at you, adoringly.

Ceci n'est pas un arbre. これは木ではありません。





Media

The fourth edition of my textbook, Approaches to Art; A New Introduction to Art History will be published by Cognella in 2026.

Two works from the "Sunset" series are published in "Liminal. New spaces of anxiety," 2023, by French musical artist Alt236 (Gallimard - Hoëbeke publishers).

A few of my paintings were also featured in an interview on the "Gymnastique" art and culture series called "Liminal Spaces: ces lieux qui font flipper internet" ("these places that are freaking out the internet") by the video channel ARTE:
www.arte.tv/fr/videos/110955-016-A/gymn…