BOB DILWORTH , PAINTER, RECENT WORKS

"ELIZABETH", Acrylic on Canvas 87"h x 67"w 2010

"DAN AND JAMES" , Acrylic on Canvas 87" x 67" 2010

"PENROSE" , Acrylic on Canvas 64h" x 44w" 2009-10

"PITT" , Acrylic on Canvas 64h" x 44w" 2010

"VENUS" , Acrylic on Canvas 81h" x 84w" 2010

Paintings developed within the last three years, depicting older, rural African Americans, center on constructing and portraying a world charged with the ironies of life. This painting essay centers in or near my small rural Southern community hometown - Lawrenceville, Virginia, geographically situated fifty miles south of Richmond and seventy miles west of the Atlantic shores and the Tide Water region.

Older individual African Americans will be my primary subjects.

I began to see household “shrines” and decorative objects that aimed to mediate the otherwise, arbitrary, chaotic, uncertain, and unpredictable events one often encountered.

The nature of individuality and the mirrored self, or the alter ego, can be seen in my work. Unlike the portrait based on the Renaissance model that highlights exactness of features and true resemblance of subject, I look for a more ethereal approach. Intriguing physical qualities, often as a result of long-term despair, environment, and circumstances define the subject and ultimately the painting. I found that one way to visually reflect on the nature of individuality was to create the subject’s doppelganger, two images engaged in similar activity, aware but detached from each other, driven by shared emotions, united by the same fate, and reluctantly occupy the same surroundings (the frame of the painting, as well as the space that is implied.)