FAQ’s / Statement- Ebay Painting Series
Are these for real? Where do you find this stuff?
None of the paintings depicts a real-world item, but almost all of the paintings have their beginning from items for sale on eBay. Screen-captures are a starting point, and the images are made with a great deal of re-drawing and digital manipulation so that the final product depicts something that can’t have an existence in reality but conserves some degree of the initial image.
Why are you doing this?
I am fictionalizing these objects to mirror my observations on how people relate to things. Sometimes these are emotionally charged, complicated relationships, but they can also be very light-hearted, humorous, or frightening.
The ways that people relate to things, the stories that are constructed in our minds regarding them, why our ‘stuff’ is or is not of value to us - these aspects of human behavior reflect one way that we in consumer-driven cultures create meaning for ourselves. Unnecessary things can be meaningful in small ways and variations in the weight of meaning is colored by our inner associations with things. I want to explore that with these paintings.
Creating a mental picture of a thing through associative imagery is territory that’s almost wholly owned by the advertising industry, but their goal is to compel you to buy, and their imagery is 100% stylized toward that goal. What I want to do is pull out a mental picture that originates from a different set of circumstances - from the ‘experiential point of view of the consumer’ might be a way of putting it, in whatever form that might take - funny, off-beat, or poetic.
What’s so compelling about eBay isn’t that just about everything in the world is available, but that it’s marketing is stylized through the lens of an individual seller rather than through the marketing branch of a large company. It becomes a ‘reverse mirror’ of the world economy — here seen through the consumer’s perspective. On eBay, one person sells one thing to one other person - so the small stories and background information attached to the object become important stylizing points.
Why are you emailing them?
The current ‘painting-a-day’ phenomenon continues to intrigue me because it puts forth a certain model of how art and commerce intersect in the internet era. The daily posting of artistic output as a practice seems to attract a specific type of artistic motivation - generally a more commercially viable one - but it can readily be seen as a tool to explore alternative commercial mindsets and the thoughts that color our buying and selling habits when we are presented with a virtual image -a merely simulated experience - of a product. The ‘e-space’ is completely changing the way art is bought and sold now, and I’m interested in using this project to be a part of that discussion.
How many of these can you crank out in a day?
Actually, it takes quite a bit longer than it may appear - I spend a great deal of time composing and drawing the image. It’s important to me to preserve something of the character of the source image without making it too obvious where or how it’s been fictionalized, while at the same time changing it a great deal. In most cases, I want to maintain a photographic appearance to the image - that way it appears verifiable. When a drawing has come to a certain state of completeness, then I’ll paint it and make more changes to the image through that translation.
Why are there so many paintings? How many are there?
I began the project several years ago to examine another side of exploring content in art by breaking things down to very small pieces in order to make a series of single observations that could become something greater when they are seen together. As far as the number of paintings in this open-ended project, I’ve painted about 300 so far.
Do you ever start with someone else’s art?
There are a few things that I’ll never choose as source material, like pictures of someone’s artwork, or massive numbers of items offered in dutch auctions or from obviously commercial sellers. I am interested in the offerings of occasional eBay sellers who use the service in the traditional ‘garage-sale’ way.
How do you decide what to change about them?
Generally, I try to bring forth the connections that differ from those that are most commonly held. In exploring the ‘mental picture,’ I favor the off-beat, poetic, or eerie.
Why are they so small?
The size of the paintings in this project is uniform; either 6 by 4 1/2 inches or 4 1/2 by 6 inches. It’s about the size of a photo you would see on eBay.
Why do you bother to paint these - why not just print them out?
For me, the fictionalizing aspect of painting is crucial to these images. Like the sentiment that surrounds our possessions, painting exaggerates or minimizes, embellishes or conceals. A computer printout with its uniform surface lacks the warmth and invitation of the fictionalizing hand that can re-describe the entire surface of an illusion with a brush and paint. So for me, all the images need this additional step of translation - the act of painting — that seals an image into the realm of fiction but also fixes the objects securely in our human realm.