Last week I talked about the possibility of doing paintings of animals for Damaged Landscapes, which will be an exhibition of new works by the Frost Shield Kerfuffle collective of which I am a member. At the end of the post I mentioned that I had another idea that springs from a couple of sources. One of them is this phrase that’s been in my head for a while: “landscapes of the mind,” which I’ll get into in a minute. And the other one is that I keep thinking about a video I saw of George Condo talking about his work and how he always paints and draws “lunatics.” If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally paint imagined characters and you might have even thought they kind of look like lunatics, that’s not a coincidence. I’m a big Condo fan (sorry, I keep mentioning it).
On to landscapes of the mind. Last week I talked about how it is human beings who are causing climate change and many many of my fellow humans will not accept that simple fact. And that is directly causing damage to landscapes. The truth is, humans often have trouble assessing facts. For example we’re terrible at understanding statistics and probabilities. It explains why my younger self thought there was a legitimate chance of becoming a rock star and why people waste their money on lottery tickets. Let’s face it, we’re prone to all kinds of cognitive biases, not the least of which is confirmation bias where we look for “facts” that confirm what we already believe. Now I like to think of myself as a critical thinker and a scientific skeptic, and yet I also know very well that I’m prone to these things. See my post on Stupidism.
So I guess landscapes of the mind–hmm, sounds like a title–Landscapes of the Mind would be the concept of depicting the internal workings of flawed minds. So you could say I’m depicting their damaged mindscapes. Well, this show is about landscapes, so I’ll keep it as Landscapes of the Mind, but (as I do in virtually every post) I digress. So what would these paintings look like, you ask? Well, they might look like a lot of the paintings I did last year, but most of those are small and we have a rather large gallery to fill. Mind you there are ten of us in the ‘Kerfuffle, so I’m not sure how much space I’ll be allotted, but I feel like I should think bigger, at least a little. There is a painting that I did last year as cover art for Swedish electronic musicians Zleepy Yar that almost resembles a landscape painting and that or that kind of thing could work very well. But I feel like I could push it further.
In early January I did this painting of Alex Jones and a whole bunch of–hmm, what should we call them, wait I got it–lunatics! There really is no better word to describe these people. This painting was inspired by the events at the United States Capital building on January sixth. It was also a long time coming, because I’m constantly interested in the above mentioned cognitive biases and the fact that they can lead to conspiracy theories like QAnon. If you’re not familiar with QAnon I recommend looking it up. It’s bat-shit crazy. I mean you would have to be an absolute lunatic to believe it! And yet thousands of believers in this, as well as the lies about the 2020 election told by their bronzer smeared, gold cotton candy-haired leader, believed it enough that many of them were willing to risk death and prison to overturn the results of what was actually a free and fair election.
So what do you, dear reader(s) think of this possible direction? Does it address the ideas that I’m talking about in this post? Do you like it better than animals looking back at us while we destroy literal landscapes? Let me know in the comments–grrr–can’t allow comments still. Maybe leave a comment on Instagram or Facebook?