80/20
Materials: Canvas, acrylic paint, idealism, a dose of reality, audience participation, and the realization that your credit score really does matter.
Dimensions: 20x24
Series: None
Year: 2023
Price: $1,333
This idea had been swirling around in my head and on March 24th 2021 I finally wrote it down to capture as inspiration for a future painting.
I wrote “I wants to try to go back to this model in reverse. Where I relate to peoples humanity first.”
I drew a box, and within it two rectangles, one on top of the other to represent the percentage of time we relate to peoples humanity, and the majority of time that we spend relating to peoples identity. Underneath this box, I wrote “ 20% humanity equals what we all have in common, 80% identity equals what makes us different.” I followed this up with “ in love and money, everyone has become someone or something to be evaluated. This leads to judgment and categorization. I think for the longest time I related to people by their humanity, but in my early 30s, I started to identify things that make us different. I did this out of financial survival, and comparing myself to others.”
This painting finally came to life when the owner of ARTWRKD gallery in Newtown PA asked me to do a live painting demonstration during a closing reception of the Ekphrastic show which I had been part of. With no ideas of what I was going to paint, I turned to this note and decided it was going to be my focus for the evening. I spoke to the audience about the meaning behind the work, and asked them to come to my crate of colors to pick what spoke to them as either survival or enlightenment, for me to use in the painting. Survival being the bottom 80% since that is operating from identity, and enlightenment being the 20% where the magic in life happens from relating to what we as humans all have in common.
I added no extra colors of my own, just strictly what the audience chose, and what I found most fascinating is that the survival colors are mostly primary colors. Which to me felt like a nod to our primal instincts. The enlightened colors are metallics and colors associated with royalty like purples and blues.
A part of me considers that this might have a different color palette if this exercise was performed in a different country with different color associations by culture.