On Mainstream Creativity

Why come painting can’t make its way into the mainstream? There will never be another Warhol. Music and movies a painting cannot be. My little dream has always been to do art that can be appreciated by a wider audience than art people, a little something for the layman as well as the stiff intellectual type (those thinkers). I always feel like a scholar when I drink while reading something about art history or the classics. Maybe using these familiar Rock stars and other popular characters from history/pop culture, with their familiarity with the mass consciousness will help me to bring my paintings into the collective thought along with them. I was thinking about using the more familiar icons of Rock. Along with Kurt I would make an Iggy Pop action figure, or the Stones. The type images that pop into the head when you think of Rock N’ Roll. That seems like I’d be trying to hard though to make a statement about something I couldn’t put all my energy behind. Maybe at another point. That seems to be going in another direction, away from painting, although the energy of Rock and Iggy is something I want to bring back into my painting. It will help me in my goal of fooling everyone by being honest. Too much thinking. It’s something I never did but have been trained to do now.

As usual i erased the beginging marks as much as i could. The tape is to keep it from buckling from the water. These washes are watercolors and coffee concoctions. I chose these colors because I read somewhere that the old masters would sometimes put down a green undercoating and then paint browns on top of it. I figured I’d go on top with brown conte. I’m planning on having the Barbies jump out by having them through their opaqueness and amount of color. Light against dark on the bottom, dark silhouetted against light at the top. It’s all about reflections.



"I’ve never believed in doing paintings for the ‘happy few.’ I’ve always felt that painting must awaken something even in the man who doesn’t ordinarily look at pictures…And in my work, just as in Shakespeare, there are often burlesque things and relatively vulgar things. In that way I reach everybody. It’s not that I want to prostrate myself in front of the public, but I want to provide something for every level of thinking."
-Elmer Bischoff