Category Archives: Painting
Painting – Kirk Demarias “Awkward Family Portraits”
Kirk Demarias creates the stereotypical J.C. Penney awkward family portrait with an important twist: he portrays fictional families from film and TV. His colored pencil masterpieces come complete with bland studio portrait backdrops, forced smiles and bad clothes. If you don’t know what films these come from you obviousely haven’t watched a movie in 30 years. He’s even done a portrait of the Breaking Bad family to stay a bit current. I’m real partial to The Torrances and the Lundegaards – William H. Macy does have a winning smile. Slightly skewed, a little naive (on purpose) and completly hilarious. Check out more of Kirks work at http://kirkdemarais.com/
The Torrances
The Lundegaards
The Buellers
The McClaines
The Fischers
The McDunnoughs
Corky St. Clair
The Emersons
The Mitchells
The Bluths
The Johnsons
The Whites
Painters: Howard Finster
Howard Finster(December 2, 1916 – October 22, 2001) was an American artist and Baptist Minister from Summerville Georgia. His mission was to spread the word of god through his paintings – over 46,000 of them. In 1976 Howard said he had a vision to paint sacred art – “one day I was workin’ on a patch job on a bicycle, and I was rubbin’ some white paint on that patch with this finger here, and I looked at the round tip o’ my finger, and there was a human face on it… then a warm feelin’ come over my body, and a voice spoke to me and said, ‘Paint sacred art”. His images range from pop icons like Elvis and Hank Williams, to historical figures like George Washington to religious images like ‘The Devils Vice’ and ‘John the Baptist’ to his own visions. His paintings are colorful and detailed; they use flat plane without perspective and are often covered with words, especially Bible verses. Every painting also has a number: God had asked him to do 5,000 paintings to spread the gospel and Finster wanted to keep track.
He finished the 5,000 a few days before Christmas in 1985, but continued painting and numbering until the day he died. By 1989, he was already numbering in the ten thousands.
Finster first came to mass public recognition with his paintings for the covers of REM’s Reckoning and Talking Heads’ Little Creatures. He was responsible for introducing millions to what became known as outsider art, but even with his fame, he remained focused on religious outreach. He said of Talking Heads LP album, “I think there’s twenty-six religious verses on that first cover I done for them. They sold a million records in the first two and a half months after it come out, so that’s twenty-six million verses I got out into the world in two and a half months”.
Seven Devils
Hank Williams
THE LORD WILL DELIVER HIS PEOPLE ACROSS JORDAN
Talking Heads LP - Little Creatures
Thomas Edison
Four Presidents
Elvis Presley
The Devils Vice
Coke Bottle
Eisenhower
Howard Finster: Stranger From Another World
Jesus Coming in the Clouds
St. Luke
Youth of Abraham
Night Before Christmas
Finster's Brain
Painting: Thrift Store Paintings – People
I’ve always found it a bit sad coming across these paintings in thrift stores and charity shops – like finding a family album of snapshots of birthdays and holidays. Who would give them away? Who could give them away? The answer is obvious; the lousy kids, cleaning out their dead parents and grandparents homes and dumping everything at the local Goodwill. Some are better then others, some have talent, most are beyond amateur. Some of these are genuinely frightening, some hilarious and some just sad. The one thing they all share in common though is that no one knew how to paint hands.
Paintings: Men’s Magazine Illustrations – M. Kuntsler
When you’re given the job to illustrate a story called ‘Find and Kidnap the Promiscuous Vice Queen’ or ‘Tiger Bandit of Saipan’ what do you come up with? Well M. Kuntsler came up with the following. I don’t know anything at all about the artist but his/her work for various Mens Magazines throughout the 50′s and 60′s is interesting and somewhat hilarious. Titles like Real Men, Men’s Adventures, Man’s Action, Real Men, Man’s Life and Man’s Book all used this type of art to illustrate it’s pages. These would be surrounded by lurid, sensational type about Nazi’s or white slavers and almost always be about women in peril – a big theme at the time.
Painting: Wayne White
Wayne White – I first was aware of Wayne’s work from the Lambchop LP Nixon (see below). I assumed it was a super-cool graphic design created specifically for the LP. Turns out that this is what Wayne White does, and is pretty famous for. He takes mass produced lithos found in junk stores and paints 3-Dimensional phrases and words that have no real connection to the scene of the painting. It’s a very Dada approach (calling found and altered objects art) and he makes a hilarious point of it with his painting ‘Marcel DuChamp is a Big French Fag’ – DuChamp being one of the leaders of the Dadaist movement. They’re bright and odd and very, very cool. In the 80′s Wayne was the Art Director and set creator for Pee Wee’s Playhouse - now it all makes sense.
Nixon
Dude or Chick?
Pillbilly
Marcel DuChamp is a Big French Fag
Those Guys Are Pussies
Tell Me You Love Me
Fanfuckintastic
Shit Like That
NO
Clusterfuck
Are You A Boy Or A Girl
