Nine Lives
2008 - 11"x12" Acrylic, oil pastel, graphite, charcoal, newspaper, on wood.
Finished with two coats of Krylon Kamar Varnish #1312
(Private Collection - Gummersbach, Germany)

December 1, 2008

Rat lives in the New York subways. It's a hard life with the rat poison traps, the speeding subway trains, and the wild pythons. Rat decides to move above ground, and finds a nice Chinese restaurant to call home. It's a great life especially since kung pao chicken is his favorite. The only problem is the resident cat that's always chasing him. Rat does some research on cats and learns that they have nine lives. He also learns that the gold cat statue in the restaurant brings good luck. Rat goes shopping in Chinatown and buys nine good luck cats of his own. If cats can have nine lives, then so can rats.

The painting started with the rat, but I was at a dead end. I was at my local Chinese restaurant, picking up dinner and there was this gold cat statue looking at me, with his left paw raised. When I returned back to my painting, I saw a cat image in the painting (the one above rat's nose) and etched the outline with an exacto knife. I liked the cat and added eight more. This is part of my Year of The Rat series, so it's dated 4706.

 

Here's some random, abstract poetry in the painting. I underline words and phrases within the Brooklyn Rail newspaper collage and create poetry.

Inversions of Art & Nature
A powerful sense of emptiness.
Artwork thrives on tension.
We stand as a culture in emptiness.

Nature making nature is no longer.
Creating an alien.
It's not nature, though it is post-culture.
A terrifying proposal.
The road ahead.

 

Ultimately, It's Indecipherable
Recongizable, yet unfamiliar.
A cricified Christ.
Stiffened feet,
Sprouting like tree branches,
From where?

A human figure.
Identify sensations.
Pain, discomfort.
A profusion of a void.

Stare at us from multiple directions.
He is a small wooden form.

The Fern
Yellow as the light source.
A hanging fern.

The narrator slowly gazes over.
Lust and eerily maternal voyeurism.

Nature attaching itself to tree trunks.
A poetic dependence and suffocation.

 

Here is a larger, detailed photo: