The painting of Lil’ Wayne is from a series of small portrait paintings of celebrities that I have been working on as of late. I have used celebrities as a device in my paintings for some time, but I do not think that these paintings are only about celebrity. That is to say that while this subject matter is obsessively superficial, I think there is much more to these paintings than merely the stars that they depict.

I think that this sort of celebrity subject matter is in some sense a common denominator in our culture. These people are celebrities because almost all of us know who they are. In order to communicate we need a common experience as well as a language. We all know who these people are, and we also have pretty similar ideas about what various celebrities mean in our culture. Al Gore represents very different ideas than Snooki; we all understand  this. Sometimes these distinctions are much more nuanced: the difference between Gore and Snooki is obvious, the difference between Snooki and Paris Hilton is a little more complex. That been said we all get these complex ideas. This level of universal understanding is useful to me as what different celebrities have come to represent can be the basis for complex communication and it allows me to make my work accessible to as many people as possible without being at all simplistic. So, while my work is intended to be understandable to a almost anyone, I believe that this iconography is sufficiently complex to allow communication in the most highly evolved art/culture dialogue.

Lil Wayne

Archival Print

16 x 20” $200

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