(RUBE) GOLDBERG VARIATIONS

Rube Goldberg was an early 20th century cartoonist famous for his absurd solutions to common everyday problems--how to know when your slip is showing, how to "automatically" shut a screen door, how to self-propel a canoe (the secret is a hungry duck), how to instantly and effortlessly and instantly commit suicide when the stock market ticker tape falls below a certain level, and countless others. Typically Goldberg (1883-1970) would work in long horizontal panels showing a left-to-right sequence of outlandish events carried forward by an elaborate system of jerrybuilt mechanical devices that were, often as not, assisted by very accommodating animals and less often by humans who looked somewhat enslaved by the ridiculous contraptions they helped operate. He would enlist cannon balls, toy soldiers, bowling monkeys, tires, water buckets and every kind of pulley, rope, ramp, screw and gismo he could find or invent.
"Rube Goldberg" is an adjective in the dictionary. It means anything that is "fantastically complicated" and "impractical." What it meant to me was a handy representation of human absurdity. My variations on his cartoons (the pun in the title refers to Bach's "Goldberg Variations") are treated as painterly subjects, that is, images that could generate, with the right inflection, strong emotions, perhaps even tragic feelings. When in one cartoon a little tin soldier marches forward and falls into a waiting noose and is hanged simply to shut a screen door, I want my black setting and rough brushwork to make it seem comic and tragic at once, an expression of how humans hang at the abyss but nevertheless keep telling stories, make puns and, whenever it's even marginally possible, laugh. I liked the paradox of it: that I might possibly build a genuine expressive image from the most absurd and hilarious concoctions to ever come out of a comic imagination.
I did a few paintings on canvas and large sheets of paper (Blue Scarecrow With Canon Ball, acrylic on canvas, 2001 (above) is among the largest), but the majority were executed on a relatively small scale, either as pigment print or acrylic on paper or a combination of both.
"Rube Goldberg" is an adjective in the dictionary. It means anything that is "fantastically complicated" and "impractical." What it meant to me was a handy representation of human absurdity. My variations on his cartoons (the pun in the title refers to Bach's "Goldberg Variations") are treated as painterly subjects, that is, images that could generate, with the right inflection, strong emotions, perhaps even tragic feelings. When in one cartoon a little tin soldier marches forward and falls into a waiting noose and is hanged simply to shut a screen door, I want my black setting and rough brushwork to make it seem comic and tragic at once, an expression of how humans hang at the abyss but nevertheless keep telling stories, make puns and, whenever it's even marginally possible, laugh. I liked the paradox of it: that I might possibly build a genuine expressive image from the most absurd and hilarious concoctions to ever come out of a comic imagination.
I did a few paintings on canvas and large sheets of paper (Blue Scarecrow With Canon Ball, acrylic on canvas, 2001 (above) is among the largest), but the majority were executed on a relatively small scale, either as pigment print or acrylic on paper or a combination of both.