09-30-13. A 1972 Fisher-Price houseboat.

09-29-13. The cover of my passport.

09-28-13. A woodcut from "Tectonic Plates", a 2010 exhibit by New Zealand artist Sheyne Tuffery.

09-27-13. Nude man with a Hula-Hoop during a 2013 performance in NYC.

09-26-13. Police officer with a kitten.

09-25-13. "Cleats", a 2010 sculpture by Rachel Owens.

09-24-13. My vitamins.

09-23-13. Jacks.

09-22-13. Martha Rosler thrusting a rolling pin in her 1975 video "Semiotics of the Kitchen".

09-21-13. Maxwell's rubber duckie.

09-20-13. My pinky finger.

09-19-13. A Yamaha SHS-10 keytar like the one we got for Christmas in the 1980s.

09-18-13. Mario and mystery boxes.

09-17-13. Flying saucer candies.

09-16-13. Untitled (Glass in Airplane) (1965-74), a photo by William Eggleston.

09-15-13. Our unused fireplace.

09-14-13. Charlie Chaplin in a 2009 drawing by Karl Haendel.

09-13-13. The trapdoor to our attic.

Oh, Calcutta! (180)

"Oh, Calcutta! (180)", oil on canvas, 24x24 in. For sale on Etsy.

It's a football player with a giant apricot floating over his butt, standing in a field of cilantro. Let me explain how this happened. It isn't surrealism, this isn't dream imagery. It's more of a puzzle. Like many of my paintings, it started with word association. My goal was to represent the color Calcutta Curry (a shade of yellow that is color #180 in Naomi Kuno's Colorscape book). So, as I often do, I took an oblique approach to the problem.

Right now, I like for my paintings to have three layers: a real object sitting in front of me, a drawing of a detail from a photo, and a drawing of a still from a video in the background. The cilantro in the foreground is based on a real plant that I bought at Meijer. Why cilantro? Cilantro was the first ingredient of a Bengali curry that I never actually got around to making. (Bengali because Calcutta, or Kolkata, is in the Indian state of West Bengal. Is some of the rest of the painting starting to make sense? I'll get to that...) 

The next layer is the floating apricot. I deliberately selected the most butt-shaped fruit I could find. I would have preferred a peach, but the apricot had a better shape. Why a butt? The title "Oh, Calcutta!" comes from a slightly dirty French pun, which became a dirty painting, which inspired a nude Broadway musical in the 1970s. I found it when I searched for a "soundtrack" for this painting, which ended up being a Pandora station built around the track "Oh, Calcutta!" by the funk band The Meters. There's a lot of Hammond organ on there...

Finally, the football player. He plays for the Cincinnati Bengals. I made Vine videos out of found footage of the Bengals, then selected a still with one of the players sticking his butt out just so. 
Oh, Calcutta!

09-12-13. Project Google Birdhouse, a 2012 project by Taiwanese designer Shu-Chun Hsiao.

09-11-13. A man wearing elbow patches.

09-10-13. "WE LUV STRUGGLIN'", part of Sterling Ruby's Monument Stalagmite sculpture series, made in 2013.

09-09-13. Dog sharks that we saw at the Indianapolis Zoo last week.

09-08-13. Maxwell got his first haircut yesterday.

09-07-13. Maxwell and his Dada in Hamilton Co., Indiana.

09-06-13. Capes.

09-05-13. "French Horn, Unwound, Horn Against Ground", a 2001 Oldenburg/van Bruggen drawing.

09-04-13. Harold and I on a San Diego beach in March 2009.

09-03-13. Man wearing a parka.

09-02-13. "Rootbeer", a 2011 artwork by Bhakti Baxter.

09-01-13. "The Character and Shape of Illuminated Things", a 2013 sculpture by Amanda Ross-Ho that we visited today in Chicago.

08-31-13. A hectic dinner at Little Goat in Chicago tonight.