Another Great Come-Down

Today the opposite of tomato is 'Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down'


graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm

It occurred whilst studying this particular example of 'roadkill' during the process of drawing-from-life, that, as it displayed such an ubiquitous commercial brand identity & one particularly associated with Pop & the brash, celebratory, pioneering aspect of (& all those suntanned, white-toothed American teens of the TV ads of one's youth, promoting the great taste & associated to-aspire-to lifestyle of Coke), just how far this series of drawings in some way records something of the dream turning rotten...as it was inevitably doomed to do, one supposes.

It seems a strange endeavour to attempt to give life to something so essentially abject as such a used, discarded object, in the rendering of, for example, highlights to communicate a sense of form, etc: the glittering, faceted surface is undeniably a compelling spectacle, in some ways afforded a new glamour in the crushed creases & folds of the de-formed, re-formed can. There's something almost perverse, too, in the act of - constantly referring to the object itself - striving to give a sense of palpable three-dimensionality to something that appears to have been determinedly compressed, reduced, to two. And yet the fascination continues...

Soundtrack:


The Chasms 'Advance Paranoia, Advance'
Morrissey 'Vauxhall and I'
Sonic Youth 'Daydream Nation'

All suitable accompaniment to the process of drawing the current subject matter, sonically & lyrically in their various ways...