Buddy Art

Charles Deemer says the "Buddy art" I have put up at this blog is an example of "wit and mind" overcoming the limitations I have as a graphic artist.

I like that, for he nailed the essence (Deemer does that frequently).

I created the 20-odd ClipArt pieces below during the dreary winter months of 2009. I had only recently purchased my first laptop and I started to mess around with Microsoft Paint, a program I knew little about at the time.

I began with the distraction of color, splashing it around randomly like an abstract expressionist, a poor man's Jackson Pollock.

Despite my decidedly untrained art background I've always been a colorist at heart. Though I am fond of and admire technical artists, the strong renderers and the masters of perspective, it is color that sets me off when I look at a painting.

Color has always done it for me, I suppose, ever since filling the pages of my first coloring book.

The images I've posted here aren't sophisticated, nor was I talking myself into believing they were at the time I composed them.

"Childlike," my good friend Lucas, no slouch as a colorist himself, said recently.

So there I sat at my desk every day that winter, the rain pounding the window pane of my cheap basement room. I played with Paint and I played my guitar. I wrote poetry and drank beer and let the ideas come as they might.

A childlike experience indeed. I was home alone, fusing boredom and an obsession with my new toy, a shiny Toshiba laptop. Fortunately I was old enough to buy my own beer.

The overriding question became, "How do I use these wonderful tools?"

I began with juxtaposition, clashing imagery, nonsense, a childlike vernacular rooted in primary colors.

I have several favorites in the batch of thirty I made in that stretch of obsessive work, but I think I finally accepted I was onto something when El Toro En Bolero came to me. Combining wordplay in its title, a composition by Ravel which has always disgusted me, and a couple of ClipArt images that ordinarily wouldn't have meaning, I created a personal statement.

Which could read--"Don't tell me it's good when I consider it bullshit, and by-the-way, dig this red and black sheen."

"Cool," Deemer said.
"Childlike," Lucas said.
"Clever," Bacon said.

You make the stuff because you have to or don't know enough not to, but when someone "gets it" you appreciate the fact and move on to the next obsession.


TS