psychotitle

I’m definitely digging back way too far with this one, but it is pretty rare that I have a piece/body of work that I did half my lifetime ago that I still enjoy sharing with people and laughing about. Back in my senior year of high school, I was in the AP Art class and we had to create a 16-20 piece body of work on a theme of our choice for our portfolio review at the end of the year. As I was just starting to learn about a variety of artistic movements that took place in the last century or so, I decided it would be fun to paint images that were homages to some of the artists I had learned about, and in some cases admired. But with a touch of absurdity, of course.

While working on a piece that was an exercise on using contrasting colors of the color wheel, I decided to paint a pear stuck in a padded room (yellow/purple color scheme). I enjoyed the mental image of a piece of fruit being psychotic, and so there developed the subject of the rest of the paintings in the series: Psycho Fruit. With the exception of 2 pieces, the psycho pear included, the rest of the series’ paintings do in some way mimic an artist’s style or play off a specific painting by an artist.

I made this awful website ages ago to house this collection, which does get the job done so I haven’t felt much compulsion to make it better since (though one of these days I will have to rephotograph them at a higher resolution). In my typical fashion, I also created and categorized the pieces neatly into 4 series of 4. Mind you, I’m no psychiatrist, so should not have been the one diagnosing these poor fruits, so apologies if any of the neurosis are mis-categorized.

Suicide

If only I had broadened the project to include vegetables, then I would have certainly made the Van Gogh piece an *ear* of corn.

Phobias

Yeah, I don’t think that OCD is technically a paranoia, but I guess I can see why I wanted it to fit nicely into my organizational system.

Psychosis

Ok, Peter Max was an odd outlier amongst the artist I chose to emulate. But really, can you imagine a better muse than a psychedelic artist for a series about psychosis?

Personality Disorders

So that’s the truth of it all. I admit easily that I could do it all much better now (I mean, I’m technically a better painter now), but even with their flaws, I have never really gotten sick of these pieces. It’s probably a sickness of its own, but I really just enjoy how ridiculous they are. I can only imagine what the judges thought when they saw these come across their desks. Clearly they enjoyed them too, as they committed me.  To art school…