BUTTERFLIES IN BONDAGE

Butterflies in Bondage is a series of drawings I started in the summer of 1990. I began by creating a cardboard construction for my next door neighbor while living in an apartment on 3rd Avenue in San Diego, California. My neighbor Larry wanted me to create something (art) to hang on his bare living room wall.

I had collected several large cardboard shipping boxes which had been used to ship appliances to the complex. I broke them apart to create the sheets used to make the construction. I spray painted them first and then used acrylic paint with brushes to create the images on the wings.

Then, I pierced the left portion of the butterfly wing and inserted a lighting bolt through it as a destructive force on the fragile wing to restrain its activity.

I had been interested in the patterns created by butterfly wings that were not only fragile but durable. Because of the limited space in my apartment I decided to make the small drawings on bristol board drawing paper with prismacolor pencils to record my ideas for the constructions.

The poems I wrote preserved the inspiration for each artwork to be constructed some time in my future. Byzantine Talisman’s purpose was to protect the U.S.S. Independence aircraft carrier floating around in the Persian Gulf with my friend Neil McMonigle serving in the ships’s operations. Neil shared my lenghty letters with the other sailors on board for morals’ sake. When he returned to Coronado from the Gulf, he said my letters were anxiously awaited by the crew.

Since butterflies are fragile, they  represent the human life expression. And when they become unnecssarily captured and are put in bondage by sharp pins onto styrofoam they can no longer fly free among all the beautiful rainbow colors made from sunshine in the air we breathe! They will die and remain forevermore in bondage!