Electronic dependency series.

The year I did these my teacher was an "your art has to be socially relevent or else why make it" kind of guy. Sadly, mailboxes wouldn't be cutting it anymore. These pieces had to be introspective and deep and most importantly linked.

I chose to do our relationship with electricity 1) after reading the book American Gods by Neil Gaimen the second time and loving the portrayal of the 'New Gods' of technology and 2) an incident where I left my phone at home and all hell broke loose because people couldn't get a hold of me for three hours. THREE HOURS is apparently enough time for all my extracurricular activities to explode, a frequent texter to stalwartly believe I no longer love her and my mom to get "worried" when I didn't immediately return her call. It was at that moment I realized how insanely dependent we are on electricity and being "hooked up" and "plugged in".

This first image is an Intaglio/ Silkscreen, an etching combined with a screen print over it. It's actually a waterbased ink silkscreen over an oil based etching print and everyone is freaking out that this will cause cracking on their own work, but mine hasn't seemed to crackle of at all yet. It has a 'St. Anthony tormented by Demons' kind of demon in it. It's an awesome engraving by Martin Schongauer- here you see the little guys and a super bored looking St. Anthony-


I loved drawing him, and at the same time I was in figure drawing doing bones and things, so I incorporated everything I was learning at the time into it.



For this one, a silkscreen, I struggled so much getting the colors to go that I kind of flunked it. The ones that lined up were cool,I liked the design idea and I loved using the cord to make an object. My friend had to help me with the dot matrix work in Adobe Photoshop as I am technologically defunct.



This last is a summer removed from the others, keeping with the theme of electrical cords being used to create form or tie and bind us to an abstract thing like electricity. I used a '70s palette with school bus orange and avocado green type colors- it reminded me of ugly hippie wallpaper. I was in an Escher fan faze, and I did Escher-esque plugs that can stack infinitely. I love it, and I still use pretty much these colors in many of my prints today, often layered differently for different effects.


this one's 18"x24", with only five layers. It still needs some retouching with a brush and some Easy Wipe and Cad Red ink, the reds aren't what I wanted them to be.