ALEX O’NEAL

My drawings and paintings idiosyncratically address community. The work depicts circumstances that associate Americans, i.e. dysfunction, dramatic landscape, cults, homegrown terrorism, Hollywood, reverence for Native America. There is formal influence from the stylization found in Romanesque fresco, early American portrait painting, and 1960s-70s rock-n-roll imagery.

After the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta, my work slowly referred to homegrown terrorists, such as militant hillbilly moralists a la Eric Rudolph. In my scenarios, intense, flamboyant hippies, somewhere between vigilantes and anarchists, are "disguised" from the viewer, but seem challenged of blend in socially. After September 11, my drawings referred to what I called Mesopotamian nightmares that had lion and tiger attacks. These narratives eventually included other animals and earlier backwoods terrorists to make a very unpeaceable kingdom in 2003-4 oil pastels like "Mississippi Law: STOP" and "The Mean Hippies".

My current painting focus is on individual "mean hippie" personas- stylized portraits of poorly disguised, both wig-wearing and fake-bearded men and women in various states suggesting anarchy, exaltation, zealous ambition, and being arrested - thus, a recurring title, "Reach for the Sky". These works also cynically comment on the artist and the American Dream. Some characters are in ancient frames of mind, being "touched by the tiger".