Shit Still Stinks and Pigs Can’t Fly: how to hope for the impossible.
I’m not sure how it got there exactly, but this phrase bounced around in my head for 20 years, from sketchbook to sketchbook and eventually into iPhone notes and various electronic lists of ideas. It hung around waiting for me to explore it adequately. I just never seemed to find a way to get it into a visual that I wanted to make. I believe my creativity was inhibited by The Rectangle and the idea of representing “shit” too literally. Eventually my layered, cutouts materialized and I was inspired.
Pigs can’t fly is a reminder for those hoping for the impossible, for the belief in fantasy…or even those who are distracted by the escapism of fantasy.
“When pigs fly” is a way of saying that something will never happen. The phrase is often used for humorous effect, to scoff at over-ambition. Other variations on the phrase include “And pigs will fly,” this one in retort to an outlandish statement.
Shit still stinks: for those who may think that reality can be ignored…needing to be slapped back into reality.
The idea of a pig head flanked by outhouses hit me first. Rather than representing shit literally, I could allude to it with the outhouses and overcome much of what kept me from knowing how to deliver this idea. Then the clouds to tie them together, rounded out with a sun disk behind a bird to represent the aspirations of swinish flight. The flies and severed head on a stick hit me last as the piece came together, hinting at the disturbing themes from the book “Lord of the Flies.”
This is definitely one of the more interesting journeys an idea of mine has taken from conception in the 90s, to execution some 20 years later. Once a couple of things occurred to me, the ball got rolling towards a state of completion I never could have anticipated or hastened. It isn’t a pretty piece and few find any reason to look at it long enough to draw conclusions of their own about what it. And yet, I think it is one of my favorite pieces and represents so much of my growth and change from young adulthood to middle age.
Check it out in the portfolio!
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