Crateart MeetsTrenchart

I credit a lot of my influence as an artist to my growing up in Oklahoma. New York City is a wonderful place for art and culture, but I sometimes feel that the only people who understand NYC art and culture are New Yorkers. A lot of Midwestern artists come to a place like NY and slowly divorce themselves from their roots, maybe it is the very reason they chose NYC. Some, like me, find a part of themselves left behind and try to capture it.

A bit on my Dad: My dad, I don’t believe, ever had any intention of being an artist. I recall as a child seeing a painting he had done of my mother. It was maybe the single largest influence to me, I was young and I thought it was amazing. Later, after leaving OK and studying art, and becoming a professional artist in NYC I would go home and see this painting as something different. I would see my father’s work as a young man’s somewhat talented attempt to impress a woman. No issue with that, all artists have been there at some time I think, but what surprised me upon seeing it later in life was that it was not the grand master work I had remembered from my childhood. It was a gouache or acrylic on cheap canvas full of indifferent brushstrokes and a poor color pallet. I’m not saying it was ugly, because it wasn’t. I’m just saying it was the work of a young unskilled painter, and that was apparent.

I never saw my father paint anything while I was growing up. He seemed the last person on Earth you’d expect to be an artist. He had pick-up trucks and guns and loved chili and football and hunting. Other than the one painting of my mother, my parents decorated their house with Middle America, lower middleclass kitsch. There was a print of a squirrel and a chipmunk they always hung, and a saddle that once belonged to my great grandfather that was always in one corner. My dad had a large, framed, Budweiser poster depicting Custer’s Last Stand that always got the center wall space in our house, and I remember them displaying a nearly four foot wooden fork and spoon.

My parents weren’t the only ones to decorate their home in this manner, and I think this is what I mean when I say that New Yorkers only understand New York art. Middle America is full of homes decorated with poster prints, once sold at Wal-Mart for $15.99 and resold at a garage sale for $.25. This concept is something I’ve tried to capture in my work for a long time now. Items like wooden ducks and quilts and electronic waterfall clocks are a direct homage to Midwestern kitsch decoration.

Back to my Dad, once when I was a teenager he decided to make a special decoration, much to my mother’s disapproval. My father bought a small wooden case of shelves with glass doors and put it in our dining room. He then began to collect porcelain figurines that only showed black figures. Not racist figures so much, but kitschy figurines (angles, children crossing bridges, old men fishing), just instead of them being white faces everyone was black. After awhile he had filled the entire case. I remember that I always thought this was a humorous decoration in the house, and I really enjoyed his collection. I liked it then because I thought it was a delightful way for my dad to bug my mom, and because it was something so unusual. Now when I think back to this piece, I think it was a quite brilliant work. My father never made a racist statement by creating and displaying this piece, instead he accused the viewer of being racist by having a problem with it. In its concept, a white family owning and displaying a large collection of black figurines in the middle of Oklahoma during the early 1900’s, I find the piece ahead of its time. The only difference between this piece and work I might do today is that my father just made this piece for no reason and I would, today, call it art.

And that is my dad, doing it just for the hell of it, making art and not even knowing it. One time when I came home from college to visit my parents they had installed this giant popcorn maker right in the middle of their living room. I mean the kind of popcorn maker that usually has wheels and vendors use at baseball games or main street events. When I asked why it was there in their small living room my father told me he liked popcorn. Or the giant piano in their front room, which takes up as much space as a large couch. Atop it are about a hundred karate trophies my brother, Dustin, won when he was five to seven years old and a taxidermied fish affixed to a piece of drift wood. All this kind of thing and a print of a squirrel and a chipmunk, a saddle, and a print of Custer’s Last Stand.

These are the types of things which surrounded me growing up; Background images, and now I make Crateart.

So a couple of weeks ago my dad called me and told me to check out this Ebay posting he had made. My dad had bought a few items at some garage sales and decided he would just glue them together and call them art. He had taken a defused hand grenade, a plaque, and an army patch and, in his own words, spent less than 10 minutes making a work of art. He put this item on Ebay and in ten minutes had 6 bids on it for over $110. He called this kind of artwork “trench art”, because he had seen other works like it on Ebay similarly titled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_art). My dad loves Ebay and I think he was very proud that I enjoyed his Trench art piece.

My dad plans on making more trench art.

As for my conclusions on this story, other than a new respect for my father as an artist and a greater understanding of my own influences, I think I am going to take a page out of my dad’s book. I posted Froot Loop Chuck on Ebay to try to drum up some attention to my website and I have started gathering material and plan to create a few new crateart pieces to be sold on Ebay. I have done some great work in “Teach your children About Johnny Cash” and “Jag Fu”, which were made quickly and for a low cost. This new body of work will be affordable, about $50 gets you Crateart.

After everything I’ve been through as an artist, after all the failures and the indifference of the art community, I still believe in Crateart. A fusion of country kitsch and big-city fanciness, Composition and Squirrels and Chipmunks can make something beautiful. I’ll be sure to post links to the Ebay auctions as they are created. Four works will go up this week.

Froot Loop Chuck Ebay posting: http://cgi.ebay.com/Froot-Loop-Chuck-Close-not-a-cornflake_W0QQitemZ170205108280QQihZ007QQcategoryZ20158QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem