“Square Paintings” & Destroying Art

About 10 years ago, when I was still in school and knew I was a painter but hadn’t found a clear direction for my work, I did a small series of paintings inspired by the pixelation of low-quality digital photographs, the art of Chuck Close, and the images of plant cells under a microscope from some college biology class.  I decided to do these portraits of people broken up into a grid, with variations of color in each cell of the grid.  I called them “square paintings.”

It ended up being just a phase in my artistic journey, but doing those paintings taught me some skills (color mixing, composition, patience) and some new ways of looking at things.

I made 5 paintings.  The first was simply titled “Square Girl.”  I stole her face from a magazine ad for deodorant.

I painted her in cheap student-grade acrylics on a cheap student canvas board, but somehow I achieved a luminescent effect, and I still think she is the best out of all the square paintings.  Some friends of my grandparents bought her for $200, which was a big deal for me at the time.  (I was 18.)  My aunt later commissioned me to make a copy of Square Girl for her, but I don’t have a photo of that painting.

Then I made “Dove Woman,” whose face I stole from a magazine ad for Dove soap.  The gentle and stately expression in her eyes reminded me of my husband’s grandmother, so I ended up giving her this painting as a gift.

Then came “Cosmo Girl,” whose face I stole from a fashion model in a Cosmopolitan magazine.  Her hair was so much fun to paint.  The photo below isn’t actually the original “Cosmo Girl;” it’s a copy I painted of that original.  I gave the original to my husband and he still has it, somewhere.  This painting I gave to my cousin years later, because she liked it.

At this point a lot of my family were fans of the square paintings, and as I didn’t yet think of myself as “a real artist” at this point and hadn’t really shown my work to many people, I figure they were probably my only fans.  But hey, it counts!  My mother-in-law requested a square painting of a moose.  I said, “why not?”

Then I decided I needed to paint a man, so I stole a handsome one from an ad for Nautica Cologne.  I called him “Nautica Man.”  I never ended up giving or selling him to anybody.

Nautica Man has sat in my house in one place or another for 10 years, usually in some back storage room in some stack of paintings that I didn’t like anymore but couldn’t bear to throw away.  I’ve always thought of him as part of a valuable learning experience on my journey from not knowing the first thing about painting to where I am now.  It took me many hours to paint him.  But he’s not the kind of thing I’ve ever really wanted to hang on my wall.

Finally I came to my senses with this realization:  When I hold onto old art that doesn’t represent me anymore, that holds a place in my heart only because I created it, and is never seen by anybody, that art becomes dead weight.  Just knowing that the physical form of that art still sits like a lump in my home holds me back and bogs down my creative spirit.  Getting rid of the old makes room for the new to come into your life. This applies to all things, art included.

So last month I made the painful but necessary decision to euthanize Nautica Man.  I painted over him with gesso and decided to give the canvas to a student artist to reuse.

I felt slightly nauseated at the time but now I just feel free!