One night, sitting in my studio, the ceiling opens up and a pearl drops in my lap. And like the movie, A Beautiful Mind, when Russell Crowe was in that quest for finding the original thought, original idea of, that’s what happened. I came up with an original idea.
And I needed to find a stick of gum and a lottery ticket, not for the purposes of that you would imagine. Wawa sells lottery tickets, I found that out, at 10:30 at night, so I was upset about that. And then the stick of gum, the stick of gum for the purpose of
When I was a kid I remember having this gum and taking it, a stick out, it was a pack and then it was wrapped with silver wrapping. Well we would take as kids, we would take that silver wrapping and separate the silver from the wax. And if you were able to separate it just right and pull up the whole piece without tearing the silver, you were like king.
You know, it was like oh. And so I knew that and I was like oh, I got to get this stuff. So I run off to a Wawa to get this and I get back to my studio and I’ve got my gum. I pull out the gum and it doesn’t work that way anymore.
So now I’m upset you know, I need to get this out, so I’m running around my house trying to find something I was going to allow me to do that. And in my refrigerator some chocolate and inside there was a piece that was about as big as my thumb, that I was able to extract the silver from the wax. I was like ah and I went into my studio to produce this one little piece.
So this is the little piece, that is, what you see here is the silver and then the little figures, little girl up under that little piece of silver where I actually had scratched away.
That’s why I needed a lottery ticket, I wanted to see how a lottery ticket worked and what you scratch because we spend so much time in this society scratching to get to something of that, of value. And so what I’m saying, so the next day I went and I got some gold leaf.
And so what I’m saying is, we need to scratch away to understand that our most precious commodity is our children.
And so having that, that understanding and that principle, I said you know to really make this, carry this to the next level, what I need to do is put it on a lottery ticket.
And so each image on the lottery ticket basically will have, each lottery ticket has their own number, three digit number. Each painting is going to be titled like zero-seven-zero as their little Social Security Number. I have a ledger that basically will have that number with the real child’s name and so 20 years, 25 years from now, you will find out what lottery was pulled.
‘Cause life is a lottery, you know, so you never know whether or not a child, what they’re going to become. And so this is that whole process, that whole understanding of and how we need to view our children and their value. I took it one step further, when someone saw these, they said, wow, they’re like icons.
Oh my God, 12th century icons. In the 12th century, icons were only of people of prominence, you had to be a bishop, you know, a king, Christ, you know a queen, something of what they considered importance. Wow, what a contradiction in term in the sense. Here’s a contraction of that, well these little children would have never been painted as icons in the 12th century.
So these pieces will be framed as little icons and framed just liked 11th century, the 12th century icons. So when you purchase, you’re purchasing this child, this icon, a card that is never, a card, this card that is never scratched, this lottery ticket that has never been scratched. And so you have these, this image, you know this piece of art that has these layers of basically how far can you go?
The imagination, and knowing, and only reveal on some cards, what’s, in some of these images, what I want to reveal. So what I scratch, I choose to scratch away. So you will only scratch, sometimes I will only scratch maybe this much and so that, that the anxiety that will be caused when you look at a piece and going, what’s underneath, what’s beneath that gold, what’s beneath that silver you know?
That question you won’t know until you scratch deeper and that’s the mental thing that I want to create in this process, in this art.
