Meat Wave
As you read this, at this very moment, Ukrainian civilians are facing down a near constant bombardment from Russian munitions. These are ordinary people, living and working in civilian areas and utilizing civilian infrastructure. Lives are lost every day, people injured, and non-military infrastructure destroyed. These are the inevitable results of attacks from the terrorist state of Russia. Make no mistake, this is terrorism. The people of the sovereign country of Ukraine are fighting for their lives. They are fighting for their language and culture. Everything is at stake in this illegal war of unbridled aggression.
Could there possibly be a more meaningless war than the one Russia has started in Ukraine? Denazify the population? Liberate Russian speakers? The regime can’t even articulate to the world why they are engaged in this madness, but it is no secret. The Russian dictator thought it would be over in a matter of days or weeks. He had his puppet government picked out and ready to be installed. Look no further than the rust-laden T-52’s going into offensives on the front. Conscripts, mercenaries, and prisoners being thrown into battle with little to no training. Putin miscalculated. He thought the Ukrainians wouldn’t mount a worthy resistance. He thought he could just roll in and take—control, rape, pillage. He wanted to forcibly destroy a culture. Rewrite a history. Erase a language. Subjugate a people. He was wrong. The people stood up and gave their lives. The failure of the free world to act and forcibly punish the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 is impetus adding to Putin’s impudence. Did Putin think the democratic powers of the world gave him silent permission to invade again?
The Russian state does not value human life. This is an undeniable fact, but this point takes a harrowing turn when looking at how little Russian commanders value the lives of their own soldiers. Waves upon waves of meat. First, it was the Wagner mercenaries using Russian prisoners as bait, flushing out Ukrainian artillery positions. Now, to gain a field here or a tree line there, Russian command pushes their soldiers, many mercenaries from foreign lands, to go on frontal attacks using cheap Chinese dirt bikes and off-road golf carts with little chance of survival. This is a sick version of Mad Max that is playing out in real life. Wave after wave of flesh sacrificed for a few hundred feet of land. Bodies splayed out and scattered across the pockmarked moonscape. This brutality would truly be unimaginable if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. This is the Russkiy mir.
Be assured, the Ukrainian army is a civilian force. Teachers, farmers, cooks, welders— they’re all sleeping in trenches on the frontlines, forced to kill and maim other human beings. They have become the flesh and blood behind the world war. Yes, this is undoubtedly a world war. The free world now fights against the tyranny of authoritarian states. Iran, China, and North Korea have banded together. We owe these Ukrainian heroes our deepest debt of gratitude as they are giving their lives for us, to help contain the frontline and save millions of European men and women from having to pick up arms.
We are witnessing a war that is rewriting military convention. From afar it’s playing out like a sadistic video game. Onlookers are watching from the safety of their homes, thousands of miles away on YouTube and Telegram. Through the lens of countless drones and body cameras, we are privy to heinous acts of human aggression and derangement. The violence moves beyond words. That said, at first, I was at times able to look past the circumstances and content of what I was witnessing and will admit that I was completely entranced with the seductive visual qualities of the drone imagery being captured. There is often a gorgeous interplay, and sometimes distortion, with the RGB color channels, especially as the drone moves higher or lower. Reds and greens merge, throb, and then separate—so much of the footage already feels like an expressionist painting. Waves of distortion pulsate and entrance. The formal qualities are simply beautiful, almost begging to take the luscious form of an oil painting.
But the content of my paintings unfolds in very much the opposite way. Birthed from primary footage depicting the battlefield, my Meat Wave series, in its simplest form, explores the final moments of life for Russian soldiers on the battlefield. Paramount to understanding the content of these paintings must be the acceptance that this unprovoked war of aggression has caused untold misery and suffering on the innocent people of Ukraine, ignited the largest land war since the end of the Second World War, displaced millions, and thrown the most powerful states into an all-out proxy conflict. In other words, to put it succinctly, there is undoubtedly a clear right and wrong here and Putin has upended the entire world order. Although this war can be blamed on a single diabolical individual, Russian soldiers have made the decision to pick up arms as an invading force, attempting to steal land, murder the people of the Ukrainian civilian army, subjugate its people, all in return for a paycheck. The horrors of the Russian war machine are without bounds. From the indiscriminate murder of civilians in Bucha, the forced deportation and subsequent indoctrination of tens of thousands of children, the deliberate attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, torture, and rape.
My paintings are meant, in part, to give the Ukrainian people who view them, a cathartic release. To view something that is paradoxically beautifully made, but also inherently violent and deeply disturbing. That liberating release sits somewhere between the need for revenge, and the desire to make sense of the new language of war as it is defined by the near constant surveillance of the battlefield. The fact that we can view, so easily across the internet, footage of a dying man’s last breath, but in the thousands, with each human body being someone’s father, brother, son, speaks directly to the cruelty and pointlessness of war. Consequently, my paintings become art objects carrying a poetically articulated anti-war message; each life lost on both sides is an absolute waste that can be traced back to the delusions of a single maniacal dictator.
