red mushroom

Red Mushroom, digital image on canvas, 32x16, 48x24

Here’s a new artwork just completed. It’s yet another red mushroom. (A coincidence given my last art post. I’ve only done two. But it is the season.) I’ve decided to refer to this recent series as “animist portraits” since they have a certain portrait quality to them. I don’t want them confused with work done by botanical illustrators or macro-photographers. I just find things around our place and make them look good. I manipulate these images just like a Playboy photographer to create something that looks real but is maybe just a hairs-breath too-good-to-be-true. I’m not heading down that road where I’m going to look up scientific names, genus and species of the little bits of flora and fauna I start with to create these images. Biggest problem I have is naming these portraits. Relatively generic words like “leaf,” “seed,” “weed,” “grass,” etc. dominate my titles and as the series grows they fail as a useful reference. I’m going to keep thinking about it. Any suggestions?*

*Note that at least for the time being I’ve forsaken irony, which may come as a shock to folks who’ve known me well (and would thus think this is ironic). I just feel I’ve lost the desire and commitment necessary to be a respectable player in an Internet-assisted universe dominated by competitive irony. Somebody’s gotta just say normal stuff.

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