After All It Was the 60's

Acrylic on canvas.

36x36x0.88"

After All, It Was the ’60s
I painted this as a memory of a time I was almost too young to remember, but somehow never really left me.
I was born in 1964, right in the middle of a decade when everything seemed to be changing—music, fashion, art, politics, sexuality, and the rules people had been told they were supposed to live by. I don't remember all of it, of course, but the imagery of that period became part of my visual vocabulary: bold colors, graphic lines, advertising, album covers, pop art, television, and women with impossibly perfect hair and eyeliner.

The woman in this painting isn't anyone in particular. To me, she's more like a memory of a woman who could have existed. Maybe I saw her on television. Maybe she was in a magazine sitting on the coffee table. Maybe she was someone's mother, someone's girlfriend, or the glamorous woman walking down the street who made you turn your head.

I wanted her to feel beautiful and composed, but also slightly removed—as though she's lost in a thought we'll never get to hear. The red, blue, black, and white are deliberately loud and unapologetic. There's something wonderfully artificial about them, like the packaging, advertising, and pop culture of the era.

There's nostalgia in this painting, but there's also humor. I wasn't interested in recreating the 1960s perfectly. I wanted to paint the way the '60s exist in my head: bright, sexy, graphic, chaotic, glamorous, and just a little strange.

Then again, after all, it was the ’60s.