This is a large painting done in acrylic paint and Sharpie marker on high quality 12oz cotton duck canvas. It is stretched around heavy duty wooden stretcher bars with cross braces for extra support. I use Golden brand acrylics which are of the highest quality available and only use paints that are lightfast and will not fade. I also use Liquitex acrylic pouring medium to achieve poured paint effects in some areas, build texture in others, or to increase transparency of the paint in areas such as the red vine like patterning in the middle-right of this painting. The Sharpie marker doodles and background patterns will fade over time but will last many years and likely quite a long time if kept out of direct sunlight.
The use of the Sharpie marker, a disposable consumer item that is so ubiquitous you can buy them at the drugstore, is in tension with the high quality specialized artists materials; the expensive UV resistant paints and special artist's canvas. The fact that it will fade over time is both an acknowledgement to our temporal existence and a nod to art history which is replete with faded paintings and other works of art. Van Gogh used red lake pigments to paint dazzlingly bright red flowers which are now faded to nearly white. Pollock and deKooning used house paints that have faded to dull greens and browns. And the brilliant, austere white Parthenon of Athens was originally painted in an embarrassingly gaudy bright color scheme. Sharpie will fade to a rather nice green brown over a decade or two. It will be uneven and unpredictable. I've been using Sharpie in my paintings for year and have not noticed any fading yet, but you can easily find examples with an image search.
The painting is signed on the back in acrylic. 2020 is the first year I am signing my paintings on the back instead of on the front. Why the change? I'm in grad school, getting my MFA. I always knew you "weren't supposed" to sign your paintings on the front, but I thought of my self as something of a rebel. Now that I'm in grad school I'm officially an insider, no longer cool and edgy, and so I must conform.
The painting is called "Some Bigger High Level Stuff" and honestly I forget where the name came from but it was probably a podcast and it was either something from Sam Harris or it was a comedy podcast like Doughboys or Comedy Bang! Bang! I do tend to listen to podcasts while painting these days, and I like to write down little snippets of language when I hear them and I think that they have a sort of poetic ambiguity to them. This painting is one of only two so far to feature this weird connected grid pattern and I think of maps and networks and ancient Roman colony plans. It's a type of growth. It is set up against what I call my vine pattern, the pink-red "leaves" that represent another form of growth, a more traditionally organic, but still rule based pattern. The top layer is poured paint with mixed slightly warm black to grey paint, smeared and dripped and pushed around the surface. This is like a representation of decay, but can also be seen as explosive growth, in which case we have three growth patterns set against each other: static grown, dynamic growth, and explosive growth. Everything is sort of coming together and falling apart at the same time in a system that has achieved a tenuous equilibrium.
My favorite little hidden details in this painting are the word "optomisim" [sic] in two inch tall dark Burgundy letters running down the lower left side of the canvas, the cartoon moose named Marm in the upper left quadrant drawn in sharpie, and the text across the top that reads "the most artistic earnings report I have ever seen" which comes from an economics podcast I was listening to. Yes, I listen to economics podcasts too. Marm shows up in quite a lot of my paintings, but I think this is a particularly good one. "optomisim" is not a word. I was trying to write "optimism" but I cannot spell and really the linguistic content of the text in these paintings is not important to me. It lends flavor to the work, but not meaning. It is referent to the context in which the painting is created and the state of my mind while creating it.
