If He Finds the Muffin Stash He Will Surely Eat Them All

This painting is about what happens when you have a stash of muffins and you want to keep them safe. Maybe you are a sea monster. Maybe you want to keep the muffins safe from sea monsters. Maybe both of these things are true. So you find a place to stash the muffins that you think is safe, but then maybe a clever octopus finds you stash of muffins. Maybe there is a map involved. Maybe there are hidden dirt people lurking in the background. Who knows? All we can say for sure is that this painting is huge, and just packed with colorful energy and ripe with narrative possibility.

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that much of the work I have produced this year is on paper, or bristol, which is fancy really thick paper that is acid free and all that so that it won’t fall apart or discolor over time. It’s what the paper pushers at the art supply store call “archival.” Part of the motivation for working on this bristol is that it’s easy to deal with, it’s no great tragedy if a painting doesn’t turn out, and it’s fairly inexpensive compared to stretched canvas. On the down side, in order to really display a work on bristol properly it has to be matted and framed, which dramatically decreases the economic advantage of working with bristol vs. canvas. Also, larger sheets of bristol become less easy to deal with, and larger frames get to be prohibitively expensive. So: I’m making the leap to working on canvas. A canvas can be hung without a frame. The edge of this particular canvas are rough, by which I mean I didn’t pay any particular attention to them so there is some paint on the edges close to the main surface, but the edges are mostly white. This is a so-called gallery canvas, meaning the stretcher frame is an inch and a half deep and is free of staples and nails. Of course, you can also put the canvas in a frame to hide the edges and to make it look fancier. The point is you don’t really need to. Also, you don’t really need to put it under glass, and when framing you can use glass-less frame. The acrylic surface can be wiped down with a damp cloth from time to time to remove dust. If you accidentally get like chocolate or spaghetti sauce on it you can just clean it off. Best to keep it out of direct sunlight, but this is true for most of your beloved material possessions.