Slick!

Grace Slick (rear) w/unidentified girlfriend
9" x 5", ink on magazine photo, before 2007

I kept thinking about this image that I produced around 2006 or 2005, or even earlier. It was definitely before my vow not to paint gratuitous nudity anymore in 2007. To easy my thoughts I went through my archive and unearthed it. It is a print on top of a magazine photograph of Grace Slick and another (unidentified) woman. I remember I cut out the photo from a Celebrity Sleuth magazine but that's about all I remember about the piece. I can't even retrace the process I used to produce the image even though I know I made a bunch of plaster prints around that time. But the image doesn't bear witness of any matrices I may have produced back then. It looks more like it's an exercise of a surrealist technique called decalcomania (of which I had never heard of at the time). Moreover I don't recall Jefferson Airplane being in the top 100 for at least twenty years, so the reason why I made it is rather mysterious to me as well. There are two reasons why I was thinking about this old picture. One is that of reference to a current news item involving a cache of nude celebrity photos (selfies mostly) that were hacked and published on line. Second is that in my painting class we discussed the use of actual photographs in a painting. In a critique a student showed a work he made using a newspaper photograph of an unidentified guitar player. Typically I transcribe photos freehand onto the canvas and do not use actual photos in my paintings. I think that within the 2,500 paintings in my top 100 archive there may be 4 that contain an actual photo (and I'm not even sure the Grace Slick was made in this context.) I did however produce a series of experimental works between 1997 and 2006 in which I did use actual photos as the ground for art pieces. Whatever the context was I wanted to share this with you. I think it's worth it.