If This is the Cubo-Weirdism Blog, What the Hell is Cubo-Weirdism?

So when the new blog page here at simoniteblog.standickie.com was launched last week there was a default name for the blog, which if I recall correctly was: Just Another WordPress Blog. Now of course, that would not do! So, off the top of my head, I changed it to Chris Simonite’s Cubo-Weirdism Blog. And few days later I added “By Chris Simonite. Who the Hell Else?”, because of course i did!

I then proceeded to ask what people on social media what they think of Cubo-Weirdism as a name for the style that I’ve become known for. I will now share with you one of the responses I got: “Cubo-Weirdism is a perfect name, not just for your style but a proclaimed MOVEMENT!” That response came from a former professor of mine who is now a good friend. So I started to think that maybe I’m on to something with this. But then I responded to her with the following plea: “but now it needs a theory, no? HEEEELP! ” And then I heard the Facebook crickets. That’s right this former professor and friend with a great deal more experience in the contemporary art world than me is apparently leaving it up to me to write about this idea! Fine! That’s what I’ll do then! So there! Take that. HA!

I kid. I didn’t really expect my friend to do any theorizing for me. Not that I’d turn down any help with this kind of thing because I don’t consider art theory to be one of my strong points, if I’m honest. But I will use the rest of this post to see if I can get some ideas down.

When thinking about Cubo-Weirdism I remembered that a couple of years ago, before I started painting in this style, I had an idea for making paintings based on the concept of pareidolia, which is basically the human tendency to see patterns pretty much everywhere. Also to hear patterns–there is a such a thing as Audio Pareidolia (think backwards masking on Led Zeppelin songs), but I’m interested in the visual kind for my purposes. Anyway, I did a couple of paintings with that idea in mind, case in point this painting entitled The King of Mars in which I took the famous “face on mars” photo, which is basically a blurry image of a mountain on mars that looks vaguely like a human face and re-imagined it as an actual face. I like this painting, but the idea of pareidolia paintings never really took off for me.

Having said all this, part of what’s interesting about my Cubo-Weirdism paintings is that the reason they work is likely exactly the reason that pareidolia happens. Even though elements of each portrait are skewed and out of place, we recognize them anyway at least partly because we’re constantly looking for patterns. But I suppose that’s also the reason cave painting, cartoon characters and even smiley faces work. We know the pattern. A circle with two dots and an ellipse and you got yerself a face! So that’s it! Cubo-Weirdism is just a fancy way of painting happy faces! Or sad faces.

So this leads me to the next Facebook comment which came from another friend who happens to be the husband of the first friend. The comment: ” “Cubo-Weirdism”. I love it! How about this for a draft statement; “Two cannibals were eating a clown. One turns to the other and says; “Does this taste funny to you…?” Now that’s just weird. And what the hell does it mean? Am I making art for cannibals? For clowns? Also, do clowns taste funny? If you hear of any clown murders/cannibalism in Winnipeg it wasn’t me. But I digress…

I feel like that’s just getting me started on the Weirdism part. I’m going to have to think about this a little more. Here is a study for a Cubo-Weirdist tiger. It can be yours for only 100 dollars. Just puttin’ it out there!