Charity

Art Description:

“Charity” Is from an ongoing series of large scale paintings on canvas based on small scale collages on paper called Pri-Merrrily Up-Stream. They are designed to mimic the cut and paste nature of papier colle. The Pri-Merrrily Up-Stream sequence speak to the history of Dadaist absurdity and to the Surrealist’s exercise known as the Exquisite Corpse wherein a collection of words or image fragments are assembled collectively resulting in an illogical conundrum. The figure in Charity was initially cobbled together from imagery cut from the pages of 1963 (the year of my birth) Encyclopedia Britannica. A nurse with legs for arms bends beatifically. Her face is silhouetted in a halted glow and a crudely drawn child’s hand holding a Monarch butterfly issues from her bonnet or nun’s habit. The word Catholic has been truncated to “Cat” and the bottom supporting element is a vintage trading stamp. The army green base color and random diagrammatic gestures and ruled lines both lead and mislead the eye hoping to find a deeper space. In each of the Pri-Merrily Up-Stream paintings the color schemes are somewhat garish or off-putting and the compositions are nonsensical. I quote from collage the formal quality of pastiche; I don’t hide or deny the seams that uneasily fit together instead I exaggerate the unwilling integration of disparate parts. In this tension I hope to sustain the restless life of the painting.

Medium Used: Oil and Latex on Canvas