Simple Subject, Complex Connotations

Many of the people I know spend several hours per day at the computer, perhaps far more time than they would prefer, so as unexciting as a person seated at a computer may seem, it is a natural subject for a slice-of-life painting. Taken directly from one of my #Draw365 sketches [above], a painting of a young man at a computer might have been any number of things ("dull" comes to mind first, followed by "boring"). However, it was the fact that my sketch somehow reminded me of Picasso's Old Guitarist that led me to make a painting out of it.

I often think quite a bit about the artists of the past and what it might have been like for some of them to meet and collaborate, however unlikely. At the Computer [below] combines my suspicion that a Picasso of the 21st Century would have certainly included a depressed "gamer" in his Blue Period work with a subtle dose of Van Gogh's Starry Night (given the array of dazzling colors that screens project on walls and faces and the fact that many chronic computer-users are also chronic night owls). While I rather doubt that Picasso and Van Gogh would have gotten along well enough to agree to a full collaboration, I would have certainly enjoyed hearing an artistic dialogue between the two. . .