NUTS!?!

Nuts!?! was just completed this morning 12/6/08. It's one of those paintings I do which almost looks like an old-school Disney illustration. Of course, I want my creative output to be pithier and edgier than a commercial illustration, but the paintings take on a life of their own. I tend to anthropomorphize animals usually by giving them big, searching eyes. Don't we all want to see a bit of ourselves in any random rodent? In a painting course I took at Yale the teacher excoriated me for the illustrative quality of my work. I had just finished 3 years of studying Chinese painting and calligraphy in Taiwan and was a bit older than my Yale classmates. It was too late. I had plotted my artistic course and wouldn't be changed by some abstract expressionist.