Standing 6ft x 4ft, Giant-Slayer is a painting derived from the fifteenth century bronze sculpture of David by Donatello. In Giant-Slayer, David has been transformed into a pictogram, whose torso and white head hover in the mists, at the apex of a pyramidal composition. Emerging from the spacial blackness of David's mythic figure is a wave-pattern that wraps around the mammoth head of the slain Goliath. The wave-pattern references the electromagnetic spectrum, whose multiple radiation frequencies include a small segment that's detectable to the naked eye as visible light-- which gives rise to our visual world of forms. Embedded within this radiation lasso, Goliath's head is painted with a relatively true likeness to his actual head in Donatello's renaissance masterpiece. Here the representational head serves a duel metaphor. On a material plane, it depicts a physical world, and the old, "institutional" guard; and-- in contrast to light-- recalls a climate of non-renewable energy modalities and their associated power structures and Geo-political frameworks. On a spiritual plane, the massive, illusionistic head embodies a world of Maya or illusion; as well as the psychological conditions that contribute to separation, conflict and chaos. Through the language of Giant-Slayer, the traditional story of David and Goliath is meant not to be subverted or its essence debased, but rather to extend its narrative relevance into the dawn of the 21st Century.
