Catty...

Today the opposite of tomato is 'part clair de lune, part sacred cow'


graphite & putty eraser/20x30cm
original source: 'The Times' 02/12/08

Despite this year's Project being derived from newspaper image sources, this drawing is still unusually topical in that its image content features part of the multimedia exhibit of 2008 Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey, entitled 'Felix Gets Broadcasted'. The newspaper photograph of the installation itself has something of an attractive painterly quality to it, already slightly 'de-photographized' one might say, thus lending itself to the process of transcription by drawing. Again, the subject allows all manner of levels of representation & reproduction, &, being part of this process, once more the flatness of the scan alas loses all sense of the physicality of the drawing's surface, the rich sheen of, particularly, the dark tonal areas which largely dominate the composition & bestow a certain 'object-quality' to the finished piece.

Interestingly, the 'by-product subject' featured within Leckey's work & referred to in its title, Felix the cartoon cat, is something of a familiar model, having inspired artists previously, including two such examples to be found within Marco Livingstone's fine volume 'Pop Art: a Continuing History', in the work of latter-day, second-generation, 1980s postmodern 'authorship-questioning' painters such as Kenny Scharf & Ronnie Cutrone, more combinations of so-called 'high' & 'low'/popular art & culture, as might be found in Mark Leckey's practice.


Kenny Scharf 'Felix on a Pedestal'
acrylic & spraypaint on canvas/1982


Ronnie Cutrone 'Sunday Painter'
acrylic on oil paintings/1985

Soundtrack:


Magnetic Fields '69 Love Songs'
PJ Harvey 'Rid of Me'
Lambchop 'OH(Ohio)'
Laura Veirs 'Year of Meteors'

Oh, the fabulous array of songwriting contained within the '69' varieties of, the sheer number of magnificent tunes within the whole, itself a wonderful, dizzying experience upon each reacquaintance: such a treasure trove of postmodern referencing too, whilst on the subject.