Destiny

This painting was another class project while at U.W. Parkside. The assignment was to make a collage from magazine pages and recreate the result in a very large painting. The images in this are obvious for me, showing the influence of Clarke and Kubrick and their science fictional ideas about evolution. I chose images related to this idea of the future, the past and how we will reach forward into space to create this very surreal work.

The painting is acrylic on canvas. The assignment required us to work very large. This was a problem for me since I have never owned a large space and have never been able to easily store large-scale artwork. Plus, as work builds up unsold I find that I have to make choices of what to hang onto. This was the largest canvas painting I have ever done, so I couldn’t hang onto it. I have destroyed this one. For this reason, I prefer to do smaller works, both to solve the issue of storing them in my modest house and to make them more easily useable in normal people’s homes.

Also, the issue of artists destroying their own work is one that is found throughout the history of art. Sometimes they look back at what they have done and feel it just isn’t up to the standard they want people to see. Other times they just don’t have money for new canvases so they need to paint over existing canvases in order to realize their latest ideas. I edit my own work for both of these reasons and have destroyed most of my early work. I really don’t think anybody will miss any of them, though there are some, like this one, that I still like.