Observations

Even though there are more eBay paintings, the last one I posted (Sink) seemed to sum up the consumer economy with a certain finality given our economic crisis, so I’ve moved on to other ideas. The ‘Medlar’ image is from a new grouping of drawings that I’ll try to post weekly for the next few months. Here’s a stab at a statement:

In this recent group of work, reconfigured passages from illuminated manuscripts have been stacked together with items for sale on eBay. I’ve produced separate bodies of work from both these sources previously, and here I’m exploring the similarities in both sets of source material at once. Not surprisingly, these similarities reflect what was culturally valuable in the past (in the illuminations) as well as what remains valuable to people today (in the eBay references), but the interesting thing to me is that the common threads don’t congeal into squishy, feel-good viewpoints such as ‘people are all the same no matter what’ or ‘human values continue throughout time.’ Instead, what seems most apparent in both sources is the relentlessly surreal quality of human behavior and thought, and this becomes the sentiment that guides the imagery.

Image size 11” × 11”, paper size 21” × 21”