Collage
This piece is based on the artist’s favorite song by the Postal Service, Clark Gable. The song is about a man trying to come to terms with what love truly is while filming a low-budget movie. The artist wanted to compress the entirety of the song, the vibes, the lyrics, the inspiring collection of instrumentals, into one image. Throughout the process, they kept adding layer after layer, like how the song itself has a lot of emotional depth, while also containing a wonderful, thoughtful story in its lyrics.
Andrè Derain’s The Guitarist is a wonderfully terrible painting. It is also the artist’s favorite painting. The artist believes if they consume a diverse array of media that is both good and bad, they can learn lessons from both. Which is why they find this painting so inspiring, because it is quite literally half-finished, and sits, framed in a museum, for all to see. To pay homage to their favorite painting, the artist really wanted to do a parody of it. Most of all, they wanted to capture the passive-aggressive glance to someone out of frame because the guitar has no strings. Then, to top off the irony, the artist added limp strings (real threads that were cut and glued on) hanging from the branches, just out of reach, keeping them far from the fret board of the guitar.
Benthos means organisms that live at the bottom of the ocean in Greek. Once learning this, the artist then wondered if a bunch of assorted deep sea creatures could run a hotel. These deep sea hotel employees try to emulate real hotels as much as possible with room service, bellhops, and uniforms. However, the underwater volcano heating system would always be on the fritz, the food is scrounged from whatever they found in the silt, and no one appreciates their hand-sewn uniforms. One of the bellhops (Named Olson) is a football fish who is missing his lure, and must use a flashlight to navigate the dim hallways. Despite his appearance, he is actually a very kind and generous…fish, and is a very excellent bellhop. For the hotel itself, it is intentionally designed to look like a mouth. The staff of the Benthos hotel are used as a message to not judge by appearances, even if they are a little creepy and have multiple sharp teeth.