If you have ever wanted a Tom Sanford but don’t have the piles of cash needed to buy one of my paintings perhaps you might be interested in this: Cyanaa is selling an archival limited edition print of “Lil’ Wayne” (2010) for only $200!

The image on the left is my painting “Lil’ Wayne.” It is 16 inches x 12 inches, oil on canvas mounted on wood, painted in 2010. The image on the right is the inspiration: Otto Dix’s 1913 “Self Portrait as Smoker.” I really love how Dix handled the smoke, and decided to riff on this beautiful painterly move in my portrait of Wayne Carter. I used the same basic composition as Dix, but decided to treat the smoke specifically in a painterly manner. I employed a more traditional technique to paint Weezy, using several glazes to portray him.

The painting of Lil’ Wayne is from a series of small portrait paintings of celebrities that I have been working on as of late. I have used celebrities as a device in my paintings for some time, but I do not think that these works are only about celebrity. That is to say that while this subject matter is ostensibly superficial, I think there is much more to these paintings than merely the stars that they depict.

I think that this sort of celebrity subject matter is in some sense a common denominator in our culture. These people are celebrities because almost all of us know who they are. In order to communicate we need a common experience as well as a language. We all know who these people are, and we also have pretty similar ideas about what various celebrities mean in our culture. Al Gore represents very different ideas than Snooki; we all understand  this. Sometimes these distinctions are much more nuanced: the difference between Gore and Snooki is obvious, the difference between Snooki and Paris Hilton is a little more complex. That said, we all understand these complex ideas. This level of universal understanding is useful to me, as what different celebrities have come to represent can be the basis for complex communication and it allows me to make my work accessible to as many people as possible without being at all simplistic. So, while my work is intended to be understandable to a almost anyone, I believe that this iconography is sufficiently complex to allow communication in the most highly evolved art/culture dialogue.

I was very pleased with how this painting came out and the print looks really great as well, so get them while they are still available!