Sample Paintings
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New Work
My recent paintings take their cue from my fascination for the nostalgia of popular culture, particularly those items that were influential, i.e., the stuff of one’s childhood, toys, books, and games. Fascinating to me is the fact that these items were largely stand-ins for the “real world”; houses, automobiles, people, animals, etc, thereby allowing me to create a narrative that is culturally relevant using images that appear, at least on the surface, to be more comforting, accessible, and less threatening.
With this memorabilia as my guide, I offer the viewer a chance to visually enter a space that is quite similar to the typical second hand store, overloaded with objects, novelties, and curiosities. Through my paintings, the viewer can relive and return to a time when learning was largely experiential and not imposed, rekindle a variety of bits and pieces of memories, and perhaps create a engaged narrative through the re-introduction of objects from a collective and familiar past. My overall intention is to simply ask the viewer to be self-reflective, to reconsider feelings or conversations they may have forgotten, places they may have been or would like to go, and material collections that are now lost or allegedly devoid of symbolism.
Stylistically, the work borrows heavily from paint-by-number paintings. The paint-by-number style reduces and abstracts the image down to essential shapes and colors, ridding the work of the excessive virtuosity of traditional rendering while still conveying an overall pictorial sense of what is depicted. I am fascinated by the utter simplicity of form and color as well as the economy of means of this particular style. The crisply delineated shapes also facilitate the transition of stacked, overlapping, or even incomplete images as an overall surface further enhancing the patterned, almost quilt-like nature of the work.
Leisure time was a new concept during the 1950’s and paint-by-number was a wildly popular hobby craze that made the successful creation of a painting available to everyone. With the purchase of an inexpensive painting kit, one did not have to worry about composition, subject matter, or the analysis of form, and success was based solely on mechanical performance or one’s ability to “stay-within-the lines.” The majority of the subject matter consisted of pets, flowers, portraits, and landscapes, and the kits contained the muted colors so popular at the time.
Needless to say, paint-by-number masterpieces were never revered, valued or collected, and have now become an ever-prominent feature of second hand stores. While walking through a flea market one afternoon, and stumbling upon a paint-by-number painting of a boy and a rabbit, it occurred to me that the best manner in which to present the imagery that fascinated me most was to borrow a style from the same era as the images I collect.
