“Did you ever get around to answering your own question?”

Nope. It is one of those questions that is supposed to make you think twice when you even say something like cultural icon. The whole notion of whose culture we are talking about is interesting to me. Hello Kitty is an icon in certain subcultures, but certainly not for everyone. Just as Marilyn Monroe could be called a cultural icon, but some youth today would not even recognize her face (and maybe they would recognize hello kitty first!)… I was interested in who people really connected to, who they really consider a cultural icon. BUt the dialogue went elsewhere which is fine too.

June,

“How big are these paintings?”
Tiny - 4×6 inches - the Guernica is 4 x7 inches. Kind of like art postcards you get at the museum shop. That was the original idea. I can’t even imagine HK on that large of a scale. She would be like a sickly sweet mouthless godzilla - it would be horrific :) But I would have some fun painting it I imagine. There is maybe something irreverant about dimishing Guernica to such a tiny size, but the art history texts, internet, museum stores already do that. I literally think of HK as frolicking through art history books, prancing across these images in her innocent cutesy way.

How big are these paintings?

I’m thinking about an earlier conversation you and I had about scale. I think these might be smallish, given that conversation;Of course, the original Guernica is huge (349 × 776 cm, 137.4 × 305.5 inches) even by my standards. What would change if you painted a Hello Kitty/Guernica at that large size? Can you imagine it changing things?

Sometimes I think that cultural icons tend to be Big — big at heart (Lincoln); big in thought (Plato); big in impact (Freud) and/or big in size — Guernica.

Or to reverse it, making Guernica a nice tidy 6 x 12 inch oil painting and putting Kitty on it (which may be about what you did)? Does that reduce the iconographical value of Guernica?

I’m just playing around in my mind the place of scale in our iconographies, and that place of scale in your artistic take with HK and the iconographies.

By the way, I thought that your HK on Guernica was terrific. I love it that she’s being bowled over by that face — somehow I’m thinking Very Bad Breath!

By the way, Leslie,

Did you ever get around to answering your own question?

Where does the flatness come from in the Van Eyck for you? Is it because of my technique of pretty direct painting versus Van Eyck’s glazing? I also think it may have to do with HK not casting much of a shadow.

Yes, all of these. The contrast with the original is disconcerting (not necessarily a bad thing).

And what do you mean by internal consistency and internal tension exactly?

Your paintings (the ones I’ve seen) combine elements that don’t obviously seem to fit together. But at their best, they resolve themselves into a whole.

Picasso, Goya, et al. weren’t voicing ethical approval for war, but they did see its aesthetic appeal.