Teratology (A Sideshow), 1996

Teratology: invented in the nineteenth century, by Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, teratology is a now seldom-used term for the study of human monsters. Monsters was also a term used by the medical profession to describe people afflicted by a wide variety of conditions, including dwarves, giants, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, midgets, and men and women born without arms and or legs.

“What monsters men have needed to believe in they have created for themselves in words and pictures when they could not discover them in nature.”  — Leslie Fiedler, Freaks, Myths and Images of the Secret Self

In this exhibition, I created for myself a group of “monsters” out of imagination and desire. These paintings are also portraits of friends; none of these people actually has anything odd about their physical appearance. Now that freak shows have all but disappeared in favor of talk shows, it seemed to me that painting, another endangered pastime, could be used to make a show of the imagination.

My beloved friends, who patiently posed for these paintings, gave me remarkable freedom to do with them as I willed, and I thank them wholeheartedly. I tried to make each portrait faithful, though of course each one is a big fiction, and delightful, even though there is somber biology throughout.