The World in Yellow
The captain of the USS Antarctic
My world is a little bit yellow, it seems. It’s warm, it’s sunny, it’s sick, it’s crusty, it’s running and dying and thriving all at the same time. It is traditionally the color or cowardice and deceit, two themes that I do like to play with in subtle ways. It’s my favorite color to use as an artist. I play mostly with warm colors, and on the off chance that I do dip into the blue end of the spectrum, it’s to make the warm colors appear that much warmer to the eye. As for imagery, I pull heavily from my Roman Catholic upbringing. The imagery associated with the classical representation of saints, halos, and other religious figures is of particular interest to me, as well as the pomp and circumstance of the catholic mass, the Latin text of the mass, and the various objects that play heavily in the services, from statues to rosaries to chalices. There’s a sort of morbidity to the Catholic imagery, in that Catholicism on the whole is strongly based on what happens when one dies. The requiem mass in particular, and the gorgeous compositions written by dead geniuses for the mourners of the world, are one of my very greatest influences. Whether I believe in God or not isn’t really a factor in my use of religious imagery–I have a comfortable relationship with the ethereal side of life, and I would use this imagery whether I was atheist or devout.
Halos all up in this bitch
Perhaps more recent of an influence, I gravitate toward medical imagery for similar reasons. Due to the near constant illness of my mother and other family members and friends, over the past five years, I have spent a great deal of time in the hospital, from emergency rooms to rehabilitation centers. It has a lot to do with death and both holding it back and giving in to it. Similar to the ornate detail of catholic objects, medical instruments, braces, and machinery evoke a certain history and painful overtone. It’s bodily. It’s bloody and painful and possibly deadly. With medical imagery, I tend to lump in physical deformity, amputation, and skeletons. Blindness, diabetes, and scars are gutting topics, even though they seem mundane on the surface. When you get right down to it, it’s incompleteness. It’s a lack of safety and normalcy and control, and those are very much what I adore dabbling with. In a similar vein, I have a keen interest in sideshows, in the way that they put human physical limitation and deviation on display, and make us think “What if I were born that way?” and “What if that happens to me?” Perhaps due to our selfish nature as humans we can only ever filter such things in how they relate to our own lives, but I like to give a bit of solace and even happiness to the memory of those who were exploited.
beheadings and watercolors
I have a tendency to pull from great periods in fashion history for my work. My greatest influences are the Rococo and Victorian periods, with a healthy portion of the 1920s and 1950s thrown in for good measure. Included in this is an interest in steampunk, although by and large I prefer traditional and historically accurate costume from the Victorian period to what steampunk has become these days. I dabble in goth and haute couture as much as the next guy, but elements of victorian and rococo styling, from corsetry and crinolines to panniers and powdered wigs, are my true loves, I suppose. I sometimes incorporate burlesque and pinup elements to my work, but more often than not, I’m slapping red and yellow watercolors on some mangled fellow with a halo, or tightening the corset laces on a clockmaker with Asperger’s syndrome.
tantamount to masturbation
I prefer to work with what is now called “traditional” or “conventional” media. I like pencils and paints and papers and pastels and the way they feel in my hands. I might not have a lot of skill, but I do have a lot of luck, for the most part, and things sort of fall into place for me, whether they’re working according to plan or not. I must admit that I was a problem child in all of my High School art classes, assuming that I knew better than the instructor a good 80% of the time. I wish I could go back and show my teachers what I’ve become. I wish I could show them what I’m doing and prove to them that I’m not really a lost cause when it comes to art. I wish I could thank them for the things that were bullshit six years ago that I live by now. All in all, I’m glad I had the teachers I had and that they liked the things that they liked, because years later I’m in love with Russian church mosaics and Gustav Klimt and Jayne Mansfield and Aubrey Beardsley and horse-hair wigs and I get what they were trying to do. I’ve worked up the courage to play with oils and ruin brushes in the pursuit of multimedia conquests. I’m using paint for texture and paper for structure and foil and collaging and everything I turned up my nose at not so long ago. What a rotten brat I am.
