ZOMBIES AND BUDDHAS 

I draw and paint with heavily pigmented cotton paper pulp. 
Each one of these paintings is 22" x 30".

Why zombies?  That is what I wanted to know.  My sons and their friends talked about them incessantly, creating elaborate scenarios for evacuation and defense when they attacked.  Each scenario had to take into account the exact nature of the zombie population, as different kinds were incapacitated in very specific ways: the details were endless and gory. They plotted escape plans for hours, and every guy who came by jumped right into the conversation. The girls I knew of this age never mentioned this potential disaster.  I never once heard a girl initiate a conversation about survival from a zombie attack.  Why young men?  Why now?

I began to ask them.  For some, it was that living a middle class life in Santa Barbara made them feel there was nothing to push against; they never had to fight for anything.  This was a mock battle to test, in theory at least, if they were strong enough to survive in a harsh world. 

What about the young men I visited in the college dorms and apartments where my sons went to school, in Chicago and Massachusetts, far from our California paradise?  For them, zombies represented the world they lived in - idiot teachers, parents and bosses, the prospect of mind-numbing jobs when they graduated, a dehumanizing war predicated on lies and greed.  On TV were leaders hell bent on pushing the globe to perpetual, imminent disaster - a world where gaming the system was an end in itself.  It’s a kind of karmic payback to imagine junk bond traders and war profiteers being infected by a virus they created - and then decapitated by the young men who’d been their pawns in this senseless world.  As heroes in their own story, they could finally save their friends from the destruction they saw so rampant in real life.

And then there were those peers of my sons who’d returned from the war in Iraq with PTSD.  Casualties of the same system, these walking wounded were struggling to regain their own humanity, stumbling away from horrific experiences that were eating their life from within.  So there’s a lost, poignant quality about zombies, too: they can remember being human.

Why buddhas?  They came out of nowhere, periodically cleansing the anger and distortions coursing through me.  I was grateful whenever they showed up.