Ron Burgundy Hyacinth

"Ron Burgundy Hyacinth", oil on canvas, 22x28 in. (55.8 x 71.1 cm). For sale on eBay.

This painting is about "burgundy", the word and the color. When I searched for "burgundy" on Twitter, the 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was mentioned by several different Twitter users. I selected this particular tweet both because of the striking image of Will Ferrell portraying Ron Burgundy and because it is an iPhone screenshot. I like to include social networking and ubiquitous technologies like smart phones in my work. 

I watched Anchorman once several years ago. I tried to check it out from the library to refresh my memory, but no copies were available. It wasn't on instant Netflix, either. The soundtrack was also not available at the library. So I made my own approximation of it by building a Pandora station around several of the songs from the soundtrack. I listened to it while I worked on the painting.

I decided to add a burgundy object to make a sort of triptych with the Ron Burgundy portrait staring from the center. I settled on burgundy hyacinth, which seemed like an appropriately phallic flower to frame the arrogantly manly Burgundy character. The two hyacinth flowers are duplicates of one image that I found online.