After drawing with watercolor pencils and/ or ink, saliva is painted onto paper, blending the pigment and adding dimension and detail.
The Saliva-Paintings employ a visual language culled from my archive of idiosyncratic entendres, jokes, observations and prejudices. I appear as myriad character types in transitional situations that grow increasingly weirder and hellacious. Through repetition and variation, I become an Everyman (and occasionally an Everywoman); the specific experiences in the paintings become a universal, existential articulation of the burden of identity and the horrors present in everyday life that we all consciously or unconsciously avoid in order to function.
This series will reach its conclusion when I have rendered myself as everyone, everything and anything that has or possibly could exist.
(DETAIL OF
SELF-PORTRAIT AS A TAP-DANCER
WATERCOLOR, INK & SALIVA ON PAPER
18” x 24”
2009)
SALIVA PAINTINGS, 2008-2009
Saliva is utilized in portraits of myself as other people to incorporate my DNA into the images. This ensures that the works will bear my imprint and be “truthful”, even if the portraits are not “accurate” representations of who and what I am.
