These paintings were made over twenty years ago, between 2000-2004, when I had just started painting and the materials and the process were a mystery to me (they are still pretty much a mystery, though I would like to believe I have made some headway). I remember saying at the time that I wanted to make religious paintings minus the trappings of traditional religion. They were absurdly ambitious since I, a religious guy, knew something about painters but almost nothing about painting. Ignorance, can sometimes, especially when one is starting out, produce the wildest results.

The original inspiration for the Superheroes went something like this: imagine superhero comics, the comics that I loved as a youth and had had little interest in since, as if written by the likes of Samuel Beckett or William S. Burroughs, with a dash of the incoherent scribblings of the alchemists of old, and illustrated by artists in line with the two Georges, Rouault and Baselitz, the painters I admired most at that time. Remember, this was before the Marvelization of America and the glut of outrageously successful superhero movies that Marvel and DC have since inflicted on us. The original impulse, in other words, was from further out in left field than it might appear today.