MONOPRINTS
Joe E. Brown Brings the Lightning Down, Collage, pigment print and oil on board, 2012.
Dick Tracy, Crime Fighter Extraordinaire. 2011.
Dual Portrait of Joe E. Brown and Cezanne, monoprint, 2011.
|
The monoprint is the most immediate form of printmaking and closest to painting. In some cases, I use it in the most direct manner possible by laying the sheet on an inked slab and drawing the image on the reverse side. It is a method that produces all sorts of fascinating accidental results. In other cases, I build up the image in a series of overlays that influence different sections of the picture, just as happens in the development of a painting. This allows me to modify the composition endlessly and adjust it at will. Alternatively, I sometimes establish a partially articulated background by running the sheet through the press and then adding collage pieces gleaned from other printed sheets. I always feel free to paint over the resulting composition with watercolor, acrylic or oil paint.
To give one example, the large-scale work called Joe E. Brown Brings the Lightning Down (left) came about through a complicated combination of digital prints (sometimes "blown out" to reveal left-over digital fragments and irregular edges), monoprint and collaged sections with additional modifications with oil. As you can see, many of the monoprints feature cartoonish figures of one kind or another, some -- like Dick Tracy -- are take-offs of well-known characters. The Joe E. Brown figure, on the other hand, along with other real-life characters, is derived from drawings found in pocket-sized pornographic cartoon books known as 8-pagers or more affectionately as Tijuana Bibles, Brown was a satchel-mouthed comedian and actor wildly popular from the 1930s until some time after the Second World War. In the 8-pagers he bedded down heiresses and movie stars galore. In my prints he usually appears as a ridiculous would-be seducer of seemingly seducible women (often famous people like Barbara"Babs" Hutton) dressed, if at all, in old-fashioned brassieres and underwear. 
Cezanne's "Le Gran Pin" With Cannons, monoprint with touches of watercolor, 2011.
|
Joe E. Brown Gets Turned Down, Monoprint, 2011
Portrait of Joe E. Brown,monoprint, 2011.
Joe E. Brown and Babs, monoprint, 2011
The Eternal Female (after Cezanne), monoprint. 2011
|
Guardian Amazon, monoprint, watercolor, 2011
Though still there, the humor is less overt in the Cannon Assault images (above), which are freely-rendered re-makes of famous Cezanne landscapes that have inexplicably been invaded by unmanned but hyperactive cannons, creating massive clouds of smoke so dense and pervasive that they nearly obliterate what Cezanne has so carefully wrought. To be both literal and punning about it, I have cannons taking out one of the canons of modernism. This group also includes an irreverent re-interpretation of Cezanne's irreverent painting, The Eternal Female. To Cezanne's array of celebratory trumpets and cash offerings by zealous admirers, I added a guy with a TV camera.