American Tefillin

This painting is my response to Grant Wood's American Gothic. It speaks to an alternative version of the American experience. I have tried to contrast Wood's austere, Protestant, agrarian portrait with the exuberant, pulsing, hopeful experience and contradictions of 2nd and 3rd generation Jews in America. The central figure is facing the past but his eye is pointed toward the promise of the future. The images, brush strokes, marks are loose, spontaneous, energetic, imperfect, reaching.