Painted Contexts

This series of paintings on paper start with a photograph of the artist from above and proceed with painted illusions of invented landscape contexts that each figure inhabits. Maps of highway cloverleaves are juxtaposed with diagrams of storms to suggest portentous relationships between culture and nature. Deliberate rifts in scale are intentionally fantastic while the color, light and perspective plausibly unify photograph with oil painting. The artist intends that his self-portrait in this context could be regarded as an "everyman", in homage to Caspar David Friedrich's silhouette of a man looking out beyond the horizon. Whether these are sketches or finished works is left to the viewer's own determination. Dimick regards these paintings as transitional because they represent a return to painting after a ten-year hiatus. They have led to a subsequent body of work that is built on these ideas.