Cartoon Paintings
This body of work contains cartoon figures and representations used as fine art visual elements. They are either combined with abstract expressionist brushwork, spread across the entire painted surface or placed in simple settings on found metal.
When the cartoons overlay the abstract background they seem to float in a swirl of color and form as though existing in the exotic atmosphere of another world. They alternately become part of, act in conflict with or would seem to exist without awareness of the abstract environment in which they are found. This creates visual tension and excitement by providing an energetic backdrop for the images to play against.
In another style the cartoon images cover the entire surface in an organic mass like the smear of a microscope slide. This effect implies a slice of something larger as though what we are seeing represents real creatures or organisms that might exist elsewhere on a scale that can’t be readily observed. The cartoons form complex visual patterns both up close, when the individual figures and symbols bring ambiguous meaning, and from a distance as an inter-play of line and form.
The cartoons on metal present simple tableaus of figures on city streets depicting strange, rudimentary misfortune: a worried, distracted figure is about to walk into a hole in the ground, someone seems to lie helpless while a stranger walks by in the distance, a drunk or disoriented figure staggers. Yet the overall effect is one of stillness and quiet rather than upset, giving an unsettling sense that, although something’s wrong, maybe it’s somehow okay. Painted on scrap found metal and framed these pieces resemble weird relics of a forgotten world.
Cartoons can evoke unconscious meaning in an unusual way. Many children’s cartoons embody “friendly” and “scary” elements at the same time, which is partly why they are interesting to us and why cartoons can be used to suggest conflicting emotional range; we grew up with a model of this split in early cartoon figures. Their edginess contains an unnerving positive and negative charge. This touches upon the emotional dualities so much a part of human nature: great success with great insecurity, outward confidence and inward loathing, fear or grief masked as anger, passivity and aggression and so on. Like messages from the id or half-recalled creatures from a disturbing dream, these cartoons appear to emanate a conflicting, or at least, uncertain emotional message. At once slightly menacing and yet pathetic, anxious but charged with intensity, showing both liveliness and lassitude, they reflect the ambivalent emotional soup that constitutes our reality.
