CRAIG CULLYArtist and Educator

Portraits of Perversions

These paintings explore the intrinsic perversion of human interpersonal relationships. The characters are caught in a crisis between social ideals of identity and personal insecurities brought on by their own conflicting wants and needs. Although the combination of surface quality, color and paint handling emphasize the paintings’ seriousness, it is undercut by what is represented. For what more are we to do but laugh when we find our relationships never truly realize the ideals we set up for them, yet we learn to love the form they have taken—flaws and all.

If these paintings leave viewers feeling slightly disturbed it is the result of their own acknowledgement that something about the uncomfortable relationships depicted within bear an uncanny familiarity to their own. The superficial seduction of the work’s initial scopic pleasure gives way to a more inclusive, albeit unsettling, understanding of the perverse nature of these relationships through an empathic dynamic between viewer and painting.