A-Gay

"A-Gay, A List Gay, noun" (8" x 8") Jaunuary 2013

A-Gay, A List Gay, noun

 I’m not as satisfied with this painting as with most of the “Gay Dictionary Series.” A-Gay refers to those gay men and lesbian women who have money and social standing. Some of them are movers and shakers. Others just have money and/or social standing. At the same time the TV series, “A-gay” portrayed the tiresome lives of a group of male model types with episodes mostly made up of sophomoric squabbling A.K.A. as bitchiness. As part of the center of the painting I used a publicity photo from the "A-Gay" TV series, repeated it in different sizes, stacked, cut apart, and partially buried in paint, then subsumed within the contents of the rest of the painting. As such I contend that the photograph is so altered as to become just another part of my painting, “A-Gay, A List Gay, noun.”

However, that mangled photo is not the part of the painting that I am dissatisfied with. First, I made the bottom two layers of slightly different hues of pink, one a rosy pink, and the other magenta pink, and evidently the two are so close in hue and shade as to read as one. Also, my large photos of fruit buried under one layer of paint seem to be anomalous to the meaning of “A-gay,” though it is possible to read them as social commentary on the Television series. I now realize that I should have done another layer of paint over them. I don’t feel as though the painting deals at all with the movers and shakers type of A-List-Gay. At the same time I am satisfied with the color scheme and composition of the painting, though I think some of the others in the series are better composed.

There are bound to be some works that are more successful than others, and I’ve found in the past that viewers often like works that I don’t. In fact sometimes viewers totally misunderstand the work, completely missing the meaning intended by the artist.* Be that as it may, I am done with “A-gay,” A List Gay, noun,” and have moved on to an entirely new batch of paintings for the series.



* I must do an entry sometime about my SUPER REAL Yellow Tulip painting made way back in 1979 that was seen by two viewers as a giant yellow oyster or frog.