When I made the Stellar Pie piece, I’d originally intended for a spoon to be flying in towards the coffee. But when I cut out all the pieces and painted them, I made a mistake. The spoon was backwards. I tried incorporating the spoon, but now it just didn’t fit. I left it out and since then I’ve just had a painted, wood rocketship spoon lying around. Well, I decided to use it for this piece. Kind of. I decided to make a new spoon out of birch plywood. This was a challenging work, but I’m happy with it! Now what am I going to do with this extra spoon….

Move, click, move, click, move, click, move, click, move, click. Sometimes I think I’ll never be satisfied. Indecision is a paralyzing thing.

6x6x2012 or bust

A new cut-out’ y’all.

A couple of new cut-outs. A different kind of cut-out. These are just paint on paper. No wood involved, but I might yet decide to make wood versions in the future. My astronaut is making another appearance, still struggling with that banana. And a new character shows up today as well, the cowboy with a little toy duck riding toy in tow.

So what’s up with these pieces? The banana and the ducky are just plain white! Well, these photos don’t show it very well, but the white silhouettes are where the shapes have literally been cut out from the paper. Gone. Forever. Nothing to fill that void. But still the astronaut and the cowboy (both possible answers to that childhood question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”) are both struggling to obtain these ridiculous objects. Does the astronaut actually think he’s going to eat that banana in deep space? (We’ve seen how that works out!) Is the cowboy going to ride that toy? Kill it for meat and leather?

I wonder if, in some way, we’re all doing the same thing—seeking things to fulfill us, replace what we lost as children, but in the end are empty and unobtainable. We grow up dreaming of being cowboys or astronauts—strong, adventurous, and heroic—but when we get there we find ourselves alone, adrift, unsatisfied, and constantly looking for distractions that’ll give us a moment of reprieve. Maybe what we really want to be when we grow up… is to still be children.

“You do a lot of cats,” my girlfriend said the other day. Perhaps she’s right. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I have to say there is something appealing with the cat-and-mouse motif that goes well beyond liking fuzzy animals.

I always hated the Tom and Jerry cartoons as a kid. That kind of a struggle frustrated me deeply. Granted, the “chase” cartoon is everywhere, and I certainly liked the Roadrunner/Wile E Coyote cartoons, but Tom and Jerry was different somehow. Tom, the cat, was supposed to be the bad guy. He’s out to eat that poor little mouse who, realistically, would never stand a chance if he didn’t have a ton of tricks and a bag full of cartoon magic behind him. I think we’re supposed to root for Jerry—the David to Tom’s Goliath—but I sympathized with Tom instead. Tom was just a cat, doing cat stuff. He needs to eat and Jerry just happens to be what he eats. He’s not evil, he’s just acting in his cat nature. Jerry, on the other hand, is a smug little ass who seems to delight in, not just escaping with his life, but in psychologically torturing Tom.

This is a fair amount of words for one little piece. I think I’m finally starting to understand this series of cut-outs. They’re about seeking but not finding. They’re about an instinctual hunger that never gets a taste. They’re about a fleeting childhood and the urge to go back in time to reclaim what was lost.

More soon…

Here they are! All in one place!

I’m very excited by this new piece, which is now hanging in my kitchen. Surrealism should be a part of everyone’s morning meal! Pop a few paintings in the toaster and break out the jam! It was a fun challenge making all the art history parodies. I also did something new by incorporating birch plywood shapes for the butter and jam as well as the backing piece to create a muli-layered effect.

The little tub of margarine is a play on Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” as well as his frequent use of the unidentified man in a bowler hat. The French should translate to “This is not butter.”

The jar of jam here with the melty strawberry is a play on Dali’s “Persistence of Memory.” “The Persistence of Strawberry” still makes me laugh.

This work is a play on Marcel Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q”, which was a play on da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, hence the moustache and goatee. I was really happy with the way this part came together. Who wouldn’t be intimidated at the idea of recreating such a famous work? The painting behind it is a play on Man Ray’s famous photograph, “Ingre’s Violin”

Lots of nerdy art history humor here. Much more work to come!