Baby Dyke

Baby Dyke, May 1, 2013 (16" x 16") actual and virtual mixed media and distress paint

This entry, about the 16” x 16” painting titled, "Baby Dyke" is the next to final entry on the LGBT Pictionary Series. I will take some photos at the opening, do an entry of those, and then move on to other “Art” matters.

It seems I’m doing all this series incorrectly, at least according to those pundits knowledgeable about “social media.” Part of the problem is that the culture has given these virtual “cybervoid” spaces the name it is now stuck with, instead of the earlier perhaps more erudite labels like Internet, Web or World Wide Web, Web pages, Website, we now have “social media,” a gaggle of spaces owned by new corporate entities that are designed around the diurnal gab of all humanity, at least that part of humanity whose governments don’t interfere with their use thereof. The "social media" are (at times) good for reporting political and social events as they occur. But, more importantly they are excellent at revealing – I suppose this makes me an elitist snob - the mundane, mostly tedious, often prejudiced reportage of every silly person on earth with a computer and/or cell phone. Sometimes the stuff one finds while cruising the “social media” is downright evil, like the terrorist pages containing bomb-building directions. Or the “tweets” and posts on “blogs,” and “facebook” of prejudiced hating folk of any/all stripes. If I wish to find anything of intellectual value, it is necessary to do a complicated and often distracting search that can take hours. Well, I could go on with this (prejudiced) rant for another hour. However, the purpose here is to end this months long reportage on my art project, “The LGBT Pictionary,” which according to one New York Times article I read recently should be defined as “self aggrandizement” rather than honest reporting upon the daily events of my boring social life.

Thus, I return to the matter at hand, the next to last entry about this series of virtual and actual mixed media distressed paintings. “Baby Dyke” is one of my favorites in the entire series. At a basic psychological level I like the colors.   I like the way the accidental qualities of the distressed paint - whether actually painted in physical space with my own real hands, or created virtually through the use of camera, computer, printed and torn paper - work in contrast to the ordering processes I go through using line, shape, and color to unite the canvas (oops, I mean in this case, wooden panel). The complex layering process adds more accident to the artwork, and also contrasts to the use of printed and torn images of the painting itself used once again to unite the entire mixed media panel. Of course this process speaks to my own perhaps schizophrenic personality, the hidden qualities I keep from others and myself, as well as the up front obvious image(s) I project to friends and family. However, in closing, all of this is a bit more revealing of actual human social and personal qualities than 99.999 percent of the banal material presented in the “social media.”