I know that sounds like a bad thing, but in a documentary about Thomas Kincaid, the self-appointed “painter of light,” someone defined kitsch in a way that changed my attitude towards the word.
Kitsch is an attempt at art which does not challenge the viewer/listener and draws out an immediate and uncomplicated emotion, like sadness, pity, or conversely, happiness.
My paintings are pure kitsch.
I draw and paint people. You don’t have to guess what they are, because they’re usually in proportion, flesh-colored, and devoid of innovative features like third eyes and square breasts.
They’re usually smiling, too, and often interacting with animals.
Go ahead. Shake your head.
I like “painterly” works, but I’m not good at producing images in bumpy, gooey paint or deconstructed shapes. Have I tried? Yeah. There’s a purple self portrait and a green depiction of my husband sitting in a box somewhere in a hall closet. They don’t evoke cries of “awww…” but people have been known to ask me “WTF” when seeing them.
Can you imagine the chutzpah of a Jackson Pollock when he first presented the public with a canvas full of paint splatters? Or a Mark Rothko, charging oodles of money for pictures of big brown rectangles?
Betcha the uppermost question in their minds was not “Is it pretty?”
There’s a magnificent contemporary painter, Cesar Santos (a Cuban!), who used to paint breathtakingly beautiful portraits. Caravaggio would have been proud of his pictures. He has moved on, and is now painting abstract shapes as brilliantly crafted and detailed as any Renaissance figure.
You know what I asked when I first saw them?
WTF.
I’ll never have the imagination to make that kind of leap.
My work will never be challenging… or important. Galleries will never clamor for the newest Pikarskys, and Sotheby’s will never raise the gavel to auction what I produce.
ampycom 