The 20th Century Room
Doom II
1984, Acrylic on Canvas, 42" x 32"How significant is it that I chose to revisit this theme six years later? I had always been bothered by the inconsistencies of the previous piece, and I spent a huge amount of time trying to rationalize its elements. The scene is simplified and delineated in this second painting, with more clues to its placement. Probably it doesn't have the same irrational impact as the original. It kind of reflects my continuing need to prove my painting vocabulary, with a greater consciousness of composition. In this painting the picture plane is a television screen, indicated by the rounded corners, which were cut from the canvas. This cliché shape of the TV's cathode ray tube has lost some of its meaning a generation later with the flatter, more rectangular displays we see today. But there was another deeper meditation going on—a reflection on the legitimacy that's conferred on every image framed by the television window, partly by intent on the part of the content providers, partly by the intentionality we confer to the medium. What, am I jealous?
