Beatle Juice: (Fall 2000)

Kai McCall an artist who worked down the hall from me at the Acme Studios on Carpenters Road came to visit me one afternoon. With a smile on his face he said, 'I really like that beatle painting on the floor'. So we laughed for a while... and I titled the series Beatle Juice. 

Beatle Juice. oil on canvas. 67 x 76 inches. Spring - Winter 2000.   Sold Private Collection of Graham Neale (BigVan.Com) - London.

Poem titled: You should not be reading this...

Feed the spiders

Wake up - it's time to work

Everyone has to work

Don't forget to feed yourself

There's a wood bug 

an empty tube of paint

someone sitting on the floor

The music is playing

but you don't hear a sound

The neighbor across the street

is peaking from behind the bush

trying to look inside

The flies are fightin', feedin'

off the germs on my feet

this though tickles, the cut on

my baby finger has clotted

This is just another useless blurb

of empty words, I'm sorry for 

wasting your time... asshole.

                                               (written 1996)

The above canvas (Beatle Juice. Oil on canvas, 67 x 76 inches) took five to six months to complete. It has approximately 35-40 layers of oil paint. It has two under paintings and is extremely textured and is best appreciated in the flesh.

Beatle Juice. Oil on linen. 16 x 32 inches. Nov 2000. Price:£600    (Available at Modern Artists Gallery).

Photo copy of a postcard I found in a card shop

My intention in this series was to do painting on the most repulsive subject matter...  To treat the cockroach  as an organic form that branched out and  into the positive and negative space of the core of the blue forms.

I was very happy with this series, but unhappy with it at the same time.  I was trying to filter in a similar seen of color as that of the Impressionists. Before starting a canvas I loaded up my palette with a spectrum of color.  But I gravitated very time to a restricted white and blue.

Beatle Juice. Oil on linen. 12 x 28 inches. Nov 2000.

The bulk of the Beatle Juice series. Fall 2000

I would like to add that I tried to add color to my palette. Brown, red, green, yellow... but I failed to expand the monochromatic palette to the best of my efforts. The preoccupation with the organic forms, manipulation of positive and negative space, and fluctuations in brush work and textures were most primary to me in this series. And as my hand warmed up to the idea of adding new colors to the palette... I grew cool to the series... and the series transformed itself into Encounters with Vincent van Gogh and Three A and Three B.

Thank you.