2013 • 45″ x 31.5″ acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets
As humans, we mask our existential angst and despair with any number of diversions and pleasurable sensory experiences…foremost among these is melted processed cheese product. This housewife’s acrimony can’t be masked as she readies to light another cigarette (a great way to hasten the death we all fear) after extinguishing the last in the party food, boldly giving a literal and figurative “Fuck You!” to whomever doesn’t like it.
The used fence pickets lend a feeling of age with the warped, knot filled support becoming part of the content of the piece, helping to evoke the bygone era represented in the woman’s clothing and the mid century chrome formica dining kitchen table. Despite the presence of the delicious cheese, she isn’t about to maintain the demure facade of the good housewife any longer.
My “elevator speech.” for this series has been lacking, I recently realized. People see the food, they see the ubiquitous devil and angel, the distressed individual, and they ask, “What does it mean?” I’m not interested in applying secret meanings postmortem, but I have thought more about how this idea was hatched and what it was about it that I found compelling.
I, as the artist, try to avoid decoding exactly the associations my brain pieces together. I don’t want to hinder creativity, inhibit visual expression, and decrease my production by having to craft everything I do into a finely honed allegory. I want unconscious associations to live, grow and evolve into surprisingly complex and rich juxtapositions that “synergize” into deeper truths. In other words I don’t sweat it. If it amuses me, I paint it.
So of course, it really isn’t important for me for the viewer to be able to cast his eyes on my piece and immediately decider its “message”. I try to provide a sideways glance at reality, to unveil the secret power of symbolic meaning and to help myself and others to stop and think about why we do what we do and why we feel the way we feel. I’m not telling stories, and I’m not trying to just make pretty pictures.
People need hints from time to time and when their interest is piqued, they ask questions. I welcome that, but I don’t always have a good answer ready. The risk is always in making the mystical complexities of a slowly developed, living, breathing painting into a simple verbal decoding. People will assume there is nothing more to discover and move on.
I have long stood back and marveled at we humans’ need to find a cultural excuse to party en masse on almost a monthly basis. We are living from diversion to diversion, ignoring the painful, scary randomness of reality. These painting are simply an illustration of how we numb ourselves to existential angst with arbitrary celebrations, comfort foods, drugs and drinks.
I have begun working on this new work. “Ennui Au Jus.”
We’ve all heard about combining food with other pleasurable sensory experiences like cheese and art shows, prime rib and strippers, sex and pastrami, so why not combine delicious food with a debilitating existential crisis?
Nothing in the world is quite so awful as boredom…I’m talking about finding life itself not only uninteresting but also purposeless. Existential boredom defines an inability to find not just particular things but all of life interesting. It manifests itself as a mood in which, for no reason you can articulate, nothing seems to satisfy—even things that normally do.
Au jus is French for “with [its own] juice”. The boredom that comes from having not purpose, no pressing need to act, no vision in our head of a future state that we mush attain, like a carrot enticing a horse to keep moving forward, can have us stewing in our warmed-over juices. We can choose to focus on happy distractions or accept that even if we find a diversion to distract us from our boredom, all we’ll have is a temporary distraction from the inevitability of a meaningless life and an insignificant death.
2012 • 42″ x 24.75″ acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets
This was created for submission to the 2012 Huevos Rancheros jurored silent art auction. I had a while back found and noted a great(?) morning after, hair of the dog type drink: egg whites and absinthe. The idea was to use eggs in a vintage graphic sign type design on old fence pickets, incorporating themes from those wonderful Victorian absinthe lithograph posters.
2012 • 52.5″ x 35″ acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets
We’ve all heard about combining food with other pleasurable sensory experiences like cheese and art shows, prime rib and strippers, sex and pastrami, so why not combine delicious food with a debilitating existential crisis?
Self doubt and sauerkraut obviously came together because of the rhyme, but the feelings of doubt that could be induced by the sight and odor of the strange and exotic are what is highlighted in this piece. The cautious angel is repulsed, the devil is ready to try anything, and the cat in the lederhosen is caught between belief and disbelief. Uncertainty, distrust, lack of sureness petrify him.
2012 • 46.5″ x 27.5″ acrylic, spray paint on recycled fence pickets
We’ve all heard about combining food with other pleasurable sensory experiences like cheese and art shows, prime rib and strippers, sex and pastrami, well we also combine delicious food with our debilitating existential crises.
I found a picture of the most bored person I could, put a chef’s hat on him and was off and running. Like Sauerkraut and Absinthe before it, this piece tries to be flat and graphic and distressed hearkening back to the days sings were hand painted on whatever wood could be found.
The text, the existential crisis, the food the materials all come together to highlight how good food and parties serve only to mask the angst that makes them so necessary for us to get through the ever changing seasons of life.
We’ve all heard about combining food with other pleasurable sensory experiences like cheese and art shows, prime rib and strippers, sex and pastrami, so why not combine delicious food with a debilitating existential crisis? Can’t recall how or why this pairing came up in an electronic conversation but it did. I’ve had “acrimony and cheese” in my idea box for a while so maybe it just took seed.
The menu so far includes:
acrimony and cheese
cinnabons and self analysis
deviled eggs and despair
ennui and baked brie
french fried fear of death
judgement and jellied eggs
night terrors and tapas
paralyzing fear and fresh fruit
regret au gratin
self doubt and sauerkraut
spiritual death and duck sauce
singularity and cinnamon sticks
Pieces in progress
“Ennui a Jus” (photoshop mock up)
The point is just about associations word play and emotional responses through the juxtaposition of unrelated subjects. I once heard you don’t stop with one great idea, you take two or more good ideas and somehow bring them together. I’m not sure “sauerkraut” constitutes a “good idea” but it certainly evokes associations to smell and taste and unique cultural influences.
