Watercolor drawings from collages

An investigation of mass consumption and insatiability drives my work. At the core of my practice is a growing lexicon of images including body-builders, hamburgers, beef, acrylic crocheted blankets, tires, cars, butterflies, birds, flowers and mushrooms. Each watercolor drawing begins with a collage using fragments from my own photographs as well as magazines.  The imagery and structure of each come about through a combination of improvisation and reference to found sources.  The collage is a generative step in the process - the watercolor, the final iteration.

The material I work with can be broadly divided into two spheres – artifacts of cultural production and elements of the natural world.   I am interested in the flow between these categories.  In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”,  Michael Pollan suggests that, within the context of industrial food production the hamburger is more a product of culture than of nature.  Likewise, the super-pumped muscles of body builders are at once natural and artificial.

I locate these works between abstraction and representation – the aggregate shapes emerge largely through a process of responding to formal qualities found in the bits of representational material.  The canny juxtapositions inherent in collage provide a context for disparate imagery.  Translating the collages into watercolor unifies the image and heightens the sensuous interplay of forms.  

For me the unlikely pairings, even the rendering of this particular imagery in watercolor, is funny – but it’s the kind of funny that is also uncomfortable.  Teased together in the collages/watercolors, these combinations formulate a dizzying, cobbled-together, super-sized world – cheery and creepy, attractive and repulsive.

Hamburgers, meat and grotesques

Gouache drawings of hamburgers and red meat play off the so-called seduction of food advertising.  The hamburgers and steaks are at once pop and painterly; drips of gouache suggest dripping meat.  Garishly colored washes often form a halo around the iconic burger or cut of meat.   The grotesques,  near formless figures articulated with only a mouth or hands, also emerge from atmospheric grounds of gouache washes.  Comic and grotesque, these characters clutching burgers, often with gaping mouths also elicit pathos.  Taken as a group the grotesques, hamburgers and meat formulate a vision of dissipation.