Cut and Splice: The DNA of Art
Each panel 60" x 36", acrylic on canvas, 2019

The motivation for this triptych is to show the stylistic evolution in the treatment of a common subject matter. The left-hand panel is a pop interpretation of a stop-motion photograph by Edweard Muybridge from 1887 titled "Woman walking down stairs". The central panel is based on Marcel Duchamp's well-known "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" from 1912, which references stop-motion photography from 25 years earlier. The right-hand panel, though not of identical composition, is Tamara De Lempicka's "Girl in a Green Dress" from 1929, a sensuous painting of the female figure from the Art Deco era.

The young girl on the left-hand panel is contemporary, and the bubbles she creates form a double helix which drifts into the adjacent panel, like the the double-helix of DNA. Several RNA codons are hidden among the benday dots of the left-hand panel.