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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.
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