| Midnight
Magic is the first watercolor painting in the whole collection.
I wanted to migrate after messing around with acrylics on canvas
for a year, and punkish fanzine-ish stuff, on and off, for years.
One night, I grabbed a set of watercolors and some papers and headed
to the Espresso Royale (great coffee shop/social hang-out in Dinkytown),
and starting messing around with friends. Later, I took everything
home, and just kept working on the painting for the better part
of a week. I just kept layering and adding and covering and removing
and coloring. The final result, which you can all see in posterity,
is something that I'm very proud of.
One
of the things in the back of my head was the jazzy style of art
in the '60s, like the movie illustration from Saul Bass (I'm thinking
of The Man With the Golden Arm and Vertigo). There's
also the Hanna-Barbara look of Yogi Bear and other various books
from childhood. The usual crazy pastiche of everything I've been
exposed to; is it any wonder that I'm such a fan of Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 and The Simpsons? Pollack meets
Picasso meets Saul Bass and Crow T. Robot, with pop culture riffing
Warhol would be proud of.
The
title comes from a popular computer pinball game from the early
'80s called David's Midnight Magic. For its time, this
was a new standard for video pinball, although I'm sure it's long
past its sell-by date. The name, however, is timeless, almost poetic;
it's wasted on some disposable bit of pop fluff. |
