Spittin' Image is a work in progress. Through image and text, it investigates the experience of being adopted by making inquiries into the nature of biological relationships -- specifically those of father and son. It is also concerned with the nature of masculinity and is a meditation on the aging male body.

I've never met anyone to whom I am directly related. I don't know what it means to look at another and see a reflected gesture or the blue of my eye gazing back. I'm told it doesn't matter, yet, everyday I'm confronted with our culture's fixation on family. Approaching a new mother, the question inevitably arises: which side does she favor? I'm left exasperated. Why does it matter so? Politics are fueled by xenophobia based in archaic notions of blood clan and ethnicity. I listen as others valorize their ethnicity and sit quietly -- without specific history -- not knowing whose side to take, expected to choose a side. As they age, friends bemoan the ways they're becoming more like their parents. I grow progressively less like mine. My gestures don't relate to theirs; I don't look like them. My opinions, choices, my very way of being, are counter-intuitive to their journey. We're told that blood is thicker than water. How is one to live if one has only water?

This is an effort to understand.

Seven Candles (twenty-four), 1973	Rumpus, 1988	Ghost Town, 1972	Boys Room (the world is flat), 1983
Wistful Boy (new kitchen), 1979	Turning a Corner (raised by wolves), 1986	Brushing (before coffee), 1985	Arms Akimbo (the activists), 1990 work in progress
Formal Portrait (the coffee drinkers), 2006	The Return, 1985	work in progress	work in progress
50 cent Rocks (dollar shots), 1987	King of His Castle (the dauphin), 1973	The Sleeping Boy (fever dreams), 1968	The Sleeping Boy (morning comes early), 1971
The Boy Mistook for a Girl (he's a super boy), 1976

All images are oil on wood panel, 48 x 60 inches, copyright 2007-2008, Pete Hocking