Art Gallery: I Think I'm Starting to Understand Why People Go to the Bathroom in Groups

I Think I'm Starting to Understand Why People Go to the Bathroom in Groups (2000)
Watercolors and correction fluid on canvas, 18" x 24"

B-Side (2001)
Mixed Media on Canvas

The title to this painting is a punchline from the MTV animated series Daria, which I absolutely loved. Daria's dry wit and endless riffing reminded me of a Gen-X Groucho Marx. You probably had to be one of the smart, brainy kids who were surrounded by vapid jocks, frats and preppies, that's your go-to program.

The style of this Watercanvas painting is more subdued than usual, relying on lighter color tones and smoother textures. There isn't six things happening at once, and the colors are somewhat subdued. It looks very well, if I must say. It's all very cosmic, as I was always a dedicated student of astronomy and spent much of my time listening to Pearl Jam's Binaural album and admiring the cover and art design.

The B-Side to this painting was one of the later ones, and this is really around the time when the zine graffiti style began to take over. There are a number of different techniques, and there's a strong effort to keep the composition varied and complex. Its design probably owes as much to newspaper and website design as anything, and once again we see my attempts to join together Pop Art with Modern Abstraction.

The model portraits were taken from catalogs that were lying around the college house I was living in at the time. I think. I can't fully remember, but I might have saved some photos and poses that I liked and held on to them for reference. All of this hails back to a short series of Model Portraits that I assembled during a two-week cold spell in early 1999, taken mostly from Victoria's Secret catalogs (among other sources). It was one of those things that impressed me at the time...but, oy froynlavin, it embarrasses me today.

In any case, this is one of the better ones, and possibly the best B-Side of the Watercanvas series.