It should’ve been done years ago!
January 29th, 2008
Steven 24″x30″ Oil on canvas.
The deprecating part of my personality wants to punish my id for not having H2BBP (a.k.a. How to be Bulletproof ) completed. I have to admit it should have been done years ago, but it wasn’t. My defense for this lack of production is that for two years of my life I did a series of paintings that, although financially unsuccessful, some people said they liked. At least that’s what I heard when I was in the room.
The collective work can be known as my Television Series. I watch a lot of T.V. and over the years it has been a big part of my life. At the time I wanted to share my television experience with the world so I decided to paint some of what I saw. I wanted to find out if the images would fundamentally be altered by the translation to paint or if they would simply appear as video stills. I’m still not entirely sure which occurred, either way the production of the work took up a chunk of life from me.
I’ve decided to start showing the images in the blog section on this site. This will be done in sequential order by date of completion. The first official painting in the series is titled Steven. I think it was taken from an episode of Nightline that dealt with a contractor who lost his son on 9/11, but to be honest I can’t fully remember.
Where I appropriated the image from isn’t the point, it was to see if I could create an independent icon separate from context while still retaining a figurative aesthetic. I mean, if it was more abstract the separation of context would have been easy. That’s what I thought at the time, but approaching galleries it seems to me abstraction or straight realism is what sells. Maybe I should of took this into account when I worked on the series, but I didn’t and I probably couldn’t have.
What’s the point in painting when the goal is to make money? Maybe if I had a kid and family my thoughts would be different. Oh well, fuck it…I’m going to work on my web comic and the galleries can go fuck themselves for all I care. I don’t necessarily want to live off the purchases of snobby rich jerks anyways. The other people that can go fuck themselves are publishers, because they don’t like my fucking comic book, so fuck them too. Hmmm….and fuck Mitt Romney, he’s like a villain in a Robocop movie or a bad SCI-FI channel Manchurian Candidate rip-off.
