Sins of the Father Series

Alexander the Great, fevered on a Babylonian couch, dying of drink after swallowing the known world; Custer sprawled on a Montana hillside the morning after dreaming of the White House; Jefferson Davis, coat in tatters, staring at the smoldering ribs of Richmond; Cortés watching his own ships burn so no man can turn back. These are not history lessons. They are large-format acrylic detonations—winhere the moment of collapse is frozen mid-breath. The figures are half-erased, half-remembered: a gold-leaf halo bleeding into rust, a cavalry saber reduced to a single white slash, the pillars of the old courthouse in Richmond, Virginia rendered so dense it seems to rise from the stretched canvas.

 

The series began with a wrecking ball.

The Roland Adobe—was demolished on its centennial to make way for a HUD apartment complex. The Roland Wrecking Ball: a bruised orange orb suspended mid-air, the wall fracturing into shards. The orb is my father’s deceptive acts—swift, absolute, obliterating the architecture of my childhood. I did not know then that I was painting his destructive traits and wondering if they would continue to disintegrate my own life. What an astonishing form of therapy, right?

 

Tom Wolfe gave me the vocabulary for the fear.

In The Bonfire of the Vanities Sherman McCoy rules the bond trading floor of Pierce & Pierce from the forty-third story—Wolfe’s fictional height, one floor above the real Salomon Brothers where I knew a bond trader who actually died in the collapse of the North Tower on September 11, 2001. Wolfe’s second warning arrived in A Man in Full: Charlie Croker, Atlanta’s colossus of concrete and ego, bankrupted by a single over-leveraged tower, stripped of everything except the will to stand up in a prison yard and discover a raw, populist second act. Twenty-five years before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator, Wolfe had already scripted the template: hubris, collapse, phoenix.

 

These paintings are not moral autopsies; they are self-portraits in negative space.

Every ruined king is also the boy behind the fence, pulse racing, asking: Could the ground open under me just as fast? The answer is yes—and no. The sins of the father are inherited, but the canvas is not. I mix the ashes of the Roland Adobe into the gesso of every panel. The gold leaf is 14-karat scrap melted from my father’s broken Swiss watch. 

 

Time, gold, ruin: all recyclable.