@theMuppetPuppet

Home Shop 2017 in Review

Home Shop 2017 in Review

@theMuppetPuppet

OnGoing Stolen Image Painting Project....

498.00

Larger Blue House Painting

Larger Blue House Painting

58.00

Lady in a Blue Dress

Lady in a Blue Dress

128.00

The Stolen Image Painting Project...

The ‘stolen image painting project’ is a series of paintings that take their inspiration from the idea that 'people don’t buy things that they need… they buy things to express their inner self to others' and it is this concept more than any other that has driven the course of western consumer society in the last half century. This was the theme I wanted to explore when I started out on this series of paintings and it would be a lie to deny that one of my primary motivations in choosing the project was to use it as a means to sell more paintings, by employing what I learned to somehow connect with peoples’ inner wallets; but more importantly I am using the series to produce a body of work that illuminates a cross section of 21st century society by creating a collection of portraits that communicate with the viewer on an subconscious level.

It was in the process of pondering the problem of how to connect my paintings with this latent need of people to express their inner selves, that the thought suddenly struck me: all these social media profiles that we see every day are just another way for people to express their inner selves to the outside world and then the notion hit me that each and every profile picture must have at it’s core, something elemental that the subject must have wanted to tell the world about themselves. I then decided to use these photos as a basis for a series of portraits investigating what exactly it was that they were hoping to express…

In the end I wanted to create a series of paintings, each one capable of interacting subconsciously with 1 of the 5 psychological categories that advertisers use to codify people as a means of selling ever more products - everything from Lynx deodorant to political candidates and consequently shaping the world of late era capitalism in their own image. I wanted to use the series of paintings to both describe and investigate this phenomena and to this end I scrolled down through hundreds of twitter profiles and categorised images into 5 stereotypes.

Sexual
Psychological
Sociological
Demand for status
Demand for recognition

By studying these images and using them as the basis for a series of portraits, I intend to imbue a series of paintings with some of these expressed emotions… and by using the images without consent I wish to question ideas of ownership in the 21st century.

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