There is no single truth. We formulate our own individual truths based upon a combination of experience, fact, fiction, mythology, and omission.

The formation of individual truth through popular culture can be illustrated by classic Hollywood Western movies. These films romanticized a period in America and helped capture the imagination of youth and adults alike by shaping an idealized, but often misleading, view of our nation and its past. The “American Western” paintings balance a fondness of my childhood memories against a critique of American exceptionalism and revisionist history through the deconstruction (both figuratively and literally) of the American flag and the simultaneous reference to Westerns that, when I was coming of age, informed my “personal truths” about the American West.