My acrylic and oil painting on canvas from this year, Bigger Than Hemingway, is included in the current show– Big Ideas– at the Art at 12 Gallery located at 12 Farnsworth Street in Boston.
Big Ideas runs from December 9, 2011-January 9, 2012 and is a show of Fort Point artists’ works of grand scale. The show includes paintings and sculptures by 25 members.
Bigger Than Hemingway was inspired by many things, but includes some meditation on the nature of fame and the changing weight of fame with various media outlets in contemporary life. In reading Hemingway: The Final Years by Michael S. Reynolds this past winter I was taken aback by the absolute intensity with which the popular media followed Hem’s every move while he was alive. He was a one person press machine that would put any of our current Facebook, Talk Soup, Reality TV, Twitter celebs to shame. His travels, his opinions, his gossips were all front page news– and it could be argued that our society doesn’t have fame to that magnitude as a possibility any longer. Can you imagine people in our generation being riveted by the comings and goings of a writer?
Combine all this with a lot of study of Basquiat and Larry Rivers over the winter, along with my enduring fascination with Hem, Ketchum, Idaho, Key west, Cuba, writing and art– and this painting was the result of a number of sketches and experiments that finally ended up on large scale canvas in considering the small things in life that superseded the staggering nature of his celebrity.
Happy to have this as a part of the show– and it is there available for purchase as well. Hope you can all check it out.