Found Art #3: Kung Fu Toast

Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Wow, Budiak, you can't possibly find any more art, I mean, seriously, how do you notice these things so often? I mean, like, dude, I mean, for realsies, where do you find all of this garbage?'
Strangely enough, Doubter McDoubtington, you might be able to find fantastic art all over the place. This week's piece was found in a place where you would expect to find a lot of nonsense and absolutely no art: Office Depot. I really didn't expect to find anything of worth in a place like that, but I happened upon a veritable diamond in the rough. A gem to be discovered, polished, and eventually sold for a crushing profit. Go in to your local big-box office store and you'll find amongst the pens, pencils, and pen/pencil combos several pads of paper that are meant to be used to test the pens. These are mere proving grounds for writing utensils to some, but to a scrappy fellow like myself they are burgeoning multilayered canvases ripe for the picking. So I found this baby on one crisp sunday afternoon amongst the signature practice sessions and doodlemaking seminars.

I was so please with this picture that I wanted to rip it off of the pad, scurry to a dark corner of the store and giggle incessantly over it, hissing at anybody who might ask me what I'm doing. I was so excited that I was instantly struck with a quandry...should I take it, or should I leave it for the masses? Well, its clear what that choice was. I, perhaps hastily, assumed that its merits would be wasted as it languished on the pad, its fate likely being scribbed over by some calligraphic vandal or thrown away to shrivel and tear amongst coffee grounds and Hot Pocket husks in the trash can of the store.
Looking deep into its Warhol-inspired cradles and plateaus, it is, in person, a tactile feast that illustrates the passion and madness of the artist. The single lines being sure and direct, and the fills being layered and piled upon as the pain in "Starry Night.' It is therefore clear that our artist was classically trained, unless the talent is the byproduct of sheer mania, as the artist is most likely rotting away at the bottom of a bottle of Johnny Walker Red at his mother's house in Illinois by now, having been destroyed both morally and physically by his contemporaries. The most bold move made by this cunning stranger is the placement of the title in the image frame, evidencing the forewardness and populism of his Pop Art roots. A second face in the foreground shadows the image of our crusty hero, echoing both his raw, pure emotion, and exhibiting a nonchalant view of the Kung Fu Toast's superego which is resolute yet conflicted; a doomed young Adam Trask standing betwixt a red hot filament and destiny itself. It is clear, at least to this reviewer, that the toast is not a representation of the artist himself, but rather is an attempt to anthropromorphize a Jungian No. 1 attempting to free himself from an oppressive archetype with whom the artist clearly has sympathy as proven by the supermasculine, romantic depiction.

Back to Short Articles