When in doubt, add another layer of paint
Layers and layers and layers. If I have learned anything in my five years of painting, it’s that I am NOT a minimalist; my paintings are better with more layers.
Now it’s time for an ADHD moment, wherein I make a quick list of associative leaps based on the idea of layers: parfaits, ogres, onions, the time I saw the film Shrek with my ex-husband, the time I “met” Shrek at Universal Studios in 2002, everything from my youth is vintage now.
all the stock images of parfait were healthy, and really I wanted something decadent. so sad
Everybody love parfait.
Every time I have tried to be a minimalist (and failed) or attempted to distill my Self down to An Identity (and again, failed), I have come back the oft-repeated line by Walt Whitman:
I contain multitudes.
You know, layers.
It’s no surprise that my most successfully executed works of art are also heavily layered. I need them to be and to say so much all at once. I want them to be one thing and everything.
I have a name for this process now. A name for this driving compulsion to stack my influences, to add paint and scrape it back, to smash together the vintage with the contemporary and to see what happens.
Spiritual Archaeology.
All these layers? They are me. It’s the ogre and the artist. the 90s farm kid who collected troll dolls and the grown-up queer who gets lost deconstructing Shakespeare and vibing to Florence + the Machine. I’m excavating my layers and putting them on the canvas. If something doesn’t look quite right, or something doesn’t feel true? If I have doubts about what it is that I’ve managed to dig up? I just add more paint.
After all, everybody love parfait. And nobody ever complained about too much ice cream.
in-progress photo of the layers of paint and paper in a Bear Country painting in 2022.
Is this song happy or unnerving? When you see schoolchildren walking quietly in a single file line, does it make you feel calm or unsettled? Is it better to be part of the in-crowd, or to forge your own path? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and neither does this painting.
Shiny Happy People Laughing (R.E.M. x Berenstain Bears) is a 20 x 20-inch mixed media canvas. It is finished with UV archival varnish and sold in a 2-inch deep, white float frame.
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