"The Rigor of Facade"  36" x 80"  oil/paper/on panel  2009

The starting point for this painting was the field of plastic surgery and the continually developing range of challenging procedures that exist today within this field. In the western world, Sir Harold Gillies performed the first plastic surgery on Walter Yeo, a British soldier, in 1917. Today, various procedures that were once risky have become common place. Face transplant surgery, now a very risky procedure, will one day be common place. People will change their faces based on vanity and insanity, much like some young people today have extensive surgeries to correct aesthetic problems that don’t exist. The issue of “wanting” or “needing” divides this painting into halves. There is one woman represented here who had plastic surgery done after she died, so as to look good at her viewing. My intention was to have this painting’s narrative work as metaphor, as well as physical reality.