Artist Statement

Jon Glidden uses traditional oil painting techniques to elucidate unconscious processes and create compositions that were often chaotic, incongruous and heavily symbolic. His work unfolds ethereal worlds where the erotic and mystical settle within surrealist landscapes. Digging deeply into the human psyche, his paintings features various political, historical and mythological figures from pagan times to the current day with a large focus on the fascist and religion leaders of World War II. His museum scale paintings use irony and satire to juxtapose religions spanning past and present times with constant injections of Freudian interpretations. Glidden’s approach to synthesize elements from his musical background, his childhood heavily embedded in the propaganda of WWII, and his travels throughout Italy and Germany speaks to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk - total work of art concept. His paintings daringly and directly pose the question of man, “Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of knowledge?” as it is stated in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  From the ecstatic Grottos to the canals and plazas of Venice, Rome’s Coliseum to the interior of Cathedrals, Glidden’s life’s work of 250 paintings divulges the horror of and embraces his own apocalyptic view on humanity.