Tracking the Right Brain- Part 3

So, a few weeks ago my son asked, "Dad?  How come you have never made a painting about gum?"  He is used to the way my brain works.  He knows that I pay very close attention to colors and textures, especially for seemingly insignificant items from daily life.  And gum is a part of daily life for my family.  We are pretty addicted, and not just the kids.  My wife and I are also known to carry around packs of our favorite flavors, ready to freshen up coffee breath, or roast beef breath, or whatever.  Mind you, this is sugar free stuff, fine for the teeth, but sweetened with mystery chemicals that might be hazardous to our health .  Anyway, I stashed my sons question away somewhere in my left brain and retrieved it just recently.  I have already described my interest in the cyclical nature of popular music and it's ability to be refreshed and repackaged, even when it has grown stylishly funky (The Beatles).  So, Naturally I  have linked this interest with my own gum consumption- refreshing the outdated and funky.  Of course, word play did play a part (as it often does) when linking disparate items like Extra sugar free gum and The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour: pop, saccharin, sweet, bold, long lasting.  But even ideas like rich flavor contrasting with concepts like "no nutritional value" are interesting to me.  But the mental images and palettes that have been mixing in my head the most recently are the contemporary, neon, pastel but artificial colors of Extra sugar free gum and the funky 1967 color schemes of The Beatles' album and film.  That, and the idea of a magical mystery tour that only takes place in your mouth.

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Tracking the Right Brain-Part 2

I do not sketch before I start a painting.  Painting non-representational (I try to avoid the word abstract- it is too loaded and too easily misunderstood), I instead start by imagining palettes that contrast and play off each other well, and then spend time color mixing (physically and mentally) as a way of "planning" a painting.  However, I have tried to expand the concept of palette to mean more than just color, but also include the texture, current events, and zeitgeist of a given moment.  This means that I am usually hunting out promising little nuggets as I go about my day. Here is an example I am currently mulling over: I recently uncovered my copy of The Beatles album "Magical Mystery Tour."  I hadn't listened to the album for years, although I could hear some songs from this album on many local radio stations since it is always popular to play The Beatles songs.  I started thinking about how The Beatles' music has just became available on itunes recently and remembered one reporter on NPR predicting that this would not amount to much considering how most people already have music by The Beatles in one form or another.  This struck me as a little funny and a little sad, this strange cycle of pop culture.  Once, Magical Mystery Tour really was magical, The Beatles being pretty avant garde and innovative in their time (I think the album was released as a part of the film, which involved loading circus performers and the the band into a bus without a script, and filming their random journey).  But we live in a culture of saturation, and so they are able to become background noise, acceptable as office music, as one local radio station loves to say.  And yet, there is still a continual push to reintroduce The Beatles to our world- the release of un-heard studio sessions a few years ago, the anniversaries of album releases commemorated by new packaging of, say, Sargent Pepper, the observation of John Lennon's birthday marked by new interviews and tribute stories- all of these readily come to mind.  How much re-listening can we do?  It seems like we will not hear anything new.  And yet, I was really excited to see Magical Mystery Tour the other day, and put it right onto my ipod. And right now I am studying the colors of the album cover in my studio.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com