In Godzilla, Julian Whatley stages a volatile convergence of visual languages—American Western iconography, military history, and Japanese pop culture—to interrogate the legacy of the atomic age and the mythologies nations construct to justify violence.

The painting centers on the first detonation of an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, rendered in stark, almost abstract form through a limited palette of lead white and lamp black. Thick impasto brushwork simulates the mushroom cloud’s overwhelming force, while flashes of the underlying deep red ground hint at fire, blood, and heat. The surface is visibly worked and reworked—scraped, sanded, and repainted—creating a charged texture suggestive of radioactive volatility.

Overlaying this American landscape of military power is a reference to Gojira (Godzilla), the 1954 Japanese film that gave form to a nation’s postwar trauma. The monster—erratic, destructive, and born of nuclear testing—is a cultural expression of collective psychological devastation. The Japanese katakana characters ゴジラ (Gojira) appear on the canvas, inscribing this history in plain sight.

Whatley uses this collision of American and Japanese visual references to reframe conventional narratives. In the dominant U.S. account, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are portrayed as necessary to end World War II and save lives. But Godzilla raises uncomfortable questions: What has been buried or minimized in that telling? Whose suffering has been rendered peripheral? And what monsters—literal or symbolic—emerge from suppressed histories?

This painting exemplifies Whatley’s larger practice: a critical excavation of mythologies through painterly means. Here, the canvas becomes a portal through which viewers must confront not only the spectacle of power, but the moral ambiguities that accompany it.