Cosmic Meanings in My Work

The Transplant show opened last night and was a great success. It was a constant stream of people from 6 PM until around 11:30. Throughout the night I had the opportunity to meet and talk to quite a few interesting people. One of the more intriguing people was an older gentleman who pulled me aside and really dissected my work. Overall, he really liked my work but had plenty of questions about where it came from and what it means. The main piece that was in question was my piece with a bunch of goonheads, one of them being red. "Why did you do this piece? Why are there 33 of them...3 rows of 11? Did you know that 33 is an important number in numerology? Why is the red one on the bottom and the 3rd one from the end? Whose color is red? And I'm not talking about Santa Claus?"

All of a sudden, my work was seeming ominous. Most of those questions never crossed my mind. The character is the product of trying to come up with some interesting designs made with simple graphic shapes. And when you're dealing with being graphic, that usually means black, white and red; the simplest, most graphic palette there is.

How the piece came together for the show was really pretty much a fluke. Saxton had seen the goonhead and suggested that I should put it in the show. And suggested that I do one with a bunch of rows of goonheads and make one of them red. It sounded like an easy piece to do, so I went about setting up the art on my computer. At the moment, I can't recall why I chose to make it a horizontal piece as opposed to vertical, but I did. I knew the final print was going to be 13 by 19 inches (that's the size of paper my printer takes and I've got no idea about the numerology behind it), so I began making rows of goonheads and scaled them up and down to see what looked good. 2 rows were too few and the goonheads were getting too small with 4 rows so I settled on 3. I never bothered to count how many were in the rows. As far as coloring one red, I did the same thing, I did what optically looked good to me. All coincidence? Forces from another dimension?

And then there was discussion about frogs and images of frogs giving babies and toddlers mental problems and making them insane.