Making Fun

Funny:  

1. intended to arouse laughter or amusement 

2. suspiciously odd or curious

I’ve made pictures since early childhood, and from the very beginning I delighted in making fun of everything. Premature exposure to Monty Python and the Holy Grail certainly nurtured the impulse. I tried so hard to be serious, but nature would out. In art school I did my best to be brooding and dark. Art history taught me that mankind’s greatest painting pretty much boiled down to two things:

1. Earnest religious scenes 

2. Modern existential randomness. 

Painting was supposed to be deadly serious. Especially modern art - so VERY serious - but who wants to look at it, really? Of course there are geniuses that stand out and whose work I love, but as a whole, ugh. It’s cathartic (or profitable) for the artist, but man, so grim. When I graduated, my angst-y paintings had kind of run their course. There were only so many naked, monolithic, tortured, monochromatic men that one guy can paint. So when the city of Baltimore held a contest in which the winner’s picture was made into a 40-foot billboard, I jumped at the chance to do something completely different. I painted this 30 inch picture:

It was colorful, playful, and fun. I don’t remember what I was thinking, I probably just sketched it without planning. It was inspired by fond memories of my years in the city at the Maryland Institute of Art.

Above: "Beautiful Billboards for Baltimore", 1990;

When I won the contest, I was filled with excitement. The billboard was on the 28th Street bridge, and it looked fantastic! I immediately saw that I could make a break with my old stuff and go somewhere new. We’d moved to a historic town in the Baltimore suburbs and lived in a big old rental house on Main Street there. I had my own studio. Around us, the county was undergoing a sad transformation: ugly townhouses, McMansions, and condominiums were creeping in everywhere like fungus. Where once were fields, now developments sprouted with names like “Whispering Pines”, seemingly named after the natural features that were ripped out for the construction.

I found the new developments weirdly funny, pristine, and horrible. Around this time I’d fallen in love with the magnificent paintings of Grant Wood, and a little light bulb went off in my head. I was going to pay tribute to Grant Wood’s landscapes, but in a contemporary incarnation.

 

Above: Grant Wood landscape painted in 1931; below: my landscape painting 1990.

I thought I was being serious. And I guess the paintings are serious because they show the destruction of the landscape by money-grubbing developers, the ugly isolation where we trap ourselves. But that’s papered over by the silly things going on in the pictures, like a man stamping artificial flowers on a concrete lawn, or a bird messing up someone’s satellite TV reception. I wanted to mock the absurdity of the suburbs - because they are truly weird. And funny.

"Pool Party at Whispering Pines", 1990

below: "Landscape with Field".

Now I wear many hats, not just my painter’s beret. But I still love to make fun of our crazy world. I make funny pictures, funny songs, funny videos. The world needs to laugh at itself - maybe in laughing we can question our own constructs.

Below: "Easter Egg Hunt"