Purplesaurus Rex, Mixed Media 2020/2021
In 2019 my father's diabetes symptoms took a dramatic turn for the worse. He started blistering and bleeding from his shins, and the accompanying nerve damage led him to a lot of falls. Every week it got worse, and in July 2020 he was both told he was going to lose his right leg, and diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to step away from painting as a reflective process and create more in the moment, so I chose to document my experience of all of this, creating a number of works and exhibiting them on Halloween as Snuggles, hosted by Jim Whittemore at his Corvallis, OR home. It felt more comfortable sharing this very private subject matter with the only people who show up to those things: friends and peers. That seemed to justify the transmutation of my family's suffering into a CV line. It was still a little gross, but I suppose that's just one of the classic artists' conundrums. On May 5th 2021 my father died. I found out on Facebook, towards the end of teaching a Drawing Concepts class remotely while away in FL. I had stuffed all of this work into storage without documenting it, and sometime after I was back, while my brother came out to see my Mom, we got hammered and took some axes to it all. Fuck this being a recording of him, I thought. It felt disgusting to have made it. We threw it all in a pile in the water pump room, where it sat for a few weeks. Looking at the mess, I thought about my experience as an artist and teacher in a time of an almost forced hyper-documentation, and it felt like maybe there was some value in the material and conceptual feedback loop that had been created. Because I can't resist a bit of black humor, what you see here is one last push into the vortex with a satirical injection of the pomp and circumstance that's often expected of artworks. Further abused with gunshots, urine, and brute force, set in the spaces he often inhabited but can no longer. I feel a sense of completion and lack of concern that I've never gotten from a wall or a cropping tool. At the same time, not the satisfaction I was after. Art has its limitations as a therapy.
This collection of work is ironically named after what he used to call the Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid he would make me after doubling the amount of sugar it called for. We all work on killing ourselves in some form or another.
Left to right by location: pump room, garden, pump room, pet graveyard, fire barrel, easement pear tree.
In 2019 my father's diabetes symptoms took a dramatic turn for the worse. He started blistering and bleeding from his shins, and the accompanying nerve damage led him to a lot of falls. Every week it got worse, and in July 2020 he was both told he was going to lose his right leg, and diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to step away from painting as a reflective process and create more in the moment, so I chose to document my experience of all of this, creating a number of works and exhibiting them on Halloween as Snuggles, hosted by Jim Whittemore at his Corvallis, OR home. It felt more comfortable sharing this very private subject matter with the only people who show up to those things: friends and peers. That seemed to justify the transmutation of my family's suffering into a CV line. It was still a little gross, but I suppose that's just one of the classic artists' conundrums. On May 5th 2021 my father died. I found out on Facebook, towards the end of teaching a Drawing Concepts class remotely while away in FL. I had stuffed all of this work into storage without documenting it, and sometime after I was back, while my brother came out to see my Mom, we got hammered and took some axes to it all. Fuck this being a recording of him, I thought. It felt disgusting to have made it. We threw it all in a pile in the water pump room, where it sat for a few weeks. Looking at the mess, I thought about my experience as an artist and teacher in a time of an almost forced hyper-documentation, and it felt like maybe there was some value in the material and conceptual feedback loop that had been created. Because I can't resist a bit of black humor, what you see here is one last push into the vortex with a satirical injection of the pomp and circumstance that's often expected of artworks. Further abused with gunshots, urine, and brute force, set in the spaces he often inhabited but can no longer. I feel a sense of completion and lack of concern that I've never gotten from a wall or a cropping tool. At the same time, not the satisfaction I was after. Art has its limitations as a therapy.
This collection of work is ironically named after what he used to call the Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid he would make me after doubling the amount of sugar it called for. We all work on killing ourselves in some form or another.
Left to right by location: pump room, garden, pump room, pet graveyard, fire barrel, easement pear tree.
