Sedimentary - Rock Quarry (2012)

So have the fence pickets, low end lowbrow stuff run its course? Or am I just painting the wrong things on it? I think I’m too tight on a surface that is too unforgiving. Am I getting ready to leave Texas for Illinois and need to switch to something more vertical (Chicago) and horizontal (prairie)?

I’m thinking layers as parts of a personality and personal history in a tall, vertical form at that resembles the human form with a slightly off center square on top for the head. Could work in expressive hands on the body and partially obscured face in the square.

This is how I could do portraits of cops who shot innocent people. Lot so fabric layers depicting white privilege and American idealism and mythological righteousness.

I could be how I paint looser and allow the ground to be incorporated into the imagery and rework the surface and generally beat the hell out of things.

The pickets can be used to make frames and ornamentation and overlays and cutout embellishments like I use now. I could use new woodworking tools to assemble rustic frames and a Dremel to carve elements.

I can bring the rectangle back and then break from it through addition rather than subtraction. The enclosed painted layered rich surface is the sacred, isolated, precious otherness. The magical realm separated from the rest of reality.

Trivial Pursuits (1999)

This same type of thing can be done with relief prints as well. different pieces cut and inked and assembled on a page one at a time.

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Posted by Dick Van der Wurst

Having descended down into South Texas through the Hill Country one day long ago, Dick never claimed to be Texan, but his German heritage and love for tacos is something he shares with the inhabitants of the region. Having earned an MFA from Miami University, OH, he spent the worst years of his life up north, maturing artistically and refining an Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ style shaped by his experiences as a recovering Catholic, cancer survivor and optimistic existentialist. He lives and works in his humble turquoise studio-home (Dick’s WurstHaus Art Shanty) near downtown San Antonio.