Sustained Investigation #14

This project began out of experimentation with oil paint sticks. I messed around with a couple of drawings on spare fabric I had, and although they never turned out to be anything cohesive, I salvaged a cut-out of a VHS TV that I had done in the corner of the image. Along with the television, there is a bag of chips, a box of tissues, and a cup of coffee. Buried behind the items in the foreground is a sleeping figure surrounded by a foggy blue and red background, with the words "five more minutes" scratched into the red paint layer, and the words "hey did you watch the new SNL skit" painted over the blue.

I continued my investigation of color and contrast to go along with my sustained investigation of comedy and tragedy, which has more or less morphed into juxtaposition of subject matter and its visual representation (since I'm not sure I can call many of my pieces funny at this point). I have chosen heavy and melancholic topics of discussion, and I have gone about representing them with bright colors and childish mark making. I kept with a motif of sleep, carried over from my two previous sustained investigations.

In this piece I wanted to address the desire and near necessity to consume and own items. The items that I focused on in this piece are all temporary, both in purpose and lifespan. The person in the center of the piece is asleep, and are rendered in dark blues and a very sickly greenish-yellow which along with their sad facial expression express a sense of sadness: this is not a happy resting time. I mean to portray the dissatisfaction that follows temporary pleasures, and the answer that feelings of sadness can turn into: sleep.