A Bagatelle

A Bagatelle, 24” x 48”, Oil on panel, 2010

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[anne karsten]

A Bagatelle is from a series of paintings depicting items for sale from the global eBay marketplace. These items gather around sentiments that are knitted together to call forth a feeling or memory that is being sloughed off by a particular set of people at this time in history.

In this painting, a sense of nostalgia is flavored with disquiet; time slows way down during a lazy summer afternoon, and the vintage deck chairs hint at a slice of life from decades ago that people pretend to remember as ideal today. While a carved segment of sky is anchored atop a paint-chipped retaining wall that obstructs our path to the beach, it holds a kite that appears frozen in space. The dreamlike feeling of the image is intensified by the sense that we are blocked at every turn to a better view of a distant vista by a relic of the past. Shadows fall toward a disembodied Yogi Bear head that served as actual playground equipment decades ago; although slowly being overtaken by natural and artificial landscaping, the head continues to lurk and grin, bathed in twilight, signaling to us that we are supposed to feel happy.