By the Waters of Babylon

By the Waters of Babylon-Fire 1, 48 x48 in., encaustic on panel

My ongoing series, “By the Waters of Babylon,” was inspired by a series of coincidences, beginning with an unforgettable dream induced by an actual fire I experienced in my neighborhood several years ago. The dream recalled from memory a short story of a future holocaust by Stephen Vincent Benet and a biblical hymn of the same title. The beginning of this body of work presaged by only a few months the catastrophic events of devastation, terrorism and destruction of 9/11 and its aftermath.

As a Virginian, it is no accident that images of past and present, memory and imagination overlap in my work, nor that current media stories and pictures of domestic and civil wars, and of natural disasters, have resonance in my mind and studio.