Description
The goal of this assignment was to create an “artist’s trap” for the artist we are researching in Seminar. The requirements were few and the result can be open ended, though it had to relate to our artist’s work and show an understanding of it. For my artist’s trap, I chose to create a set of 3 paintings directly related to 3 of Philip Guston’s works.
Summary of Research
Philip Guston was born in 1913, and immigrated to California where he grew up. He was Jewish and there was a rising KKK presence in California at the time, which affected him a lot and became a theme in his work. He also experienced a lot of trauma early in his life, after discovering his father’s suicide by hanging and losing his brother. Guston started out as a socialist muralist, and moved to New York to be part of the art scene. He became a prominent Abstract Expressionist painter, akin to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In his late career, he finally returned to a cartoonish style of figuration that yielded shocking works featuring the Klansmen hoods, and they are today what he is most known for.
My Project
For my paintings, I decided to “replicate” three of his later paintings that feature the KKK hood, with a modern twist. To me these were very interesting, because they show the Klansmen in a neutral setting, particularly, doing everyday things, like driving or painting. Guston expressed his infatuation with the idea of what evil looks like, and the thought that it doesn’t always look evil, or that anyone could be behind the hood. For my paintings, I replaced the hooded figure with 3 different figures from current events, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-Un, and Saddam Hussein. I chose these people because they are generally seen as evil people, at least to me, and they are recognizable and notable enough that their faces have become symbols in themselves. I think it’s very interesting to be able to look at these paintings of these very hated people, not overly exaggerated or evil looking, and reexamine your own relationship to that person.
