Acrylic on canvas board

2024

A random guy came into my workplace one day and asked if he could film. I told him that he wasn’t allowed to film in our building. I asked him if there was something else I could help him with but before I could finish, he pulled out his cell phone and started singing. I wasn’t sure if he was recording but he started making comments about me not letting him film, then he made several rude remarks about my appearance, and then added a few expletives before finishing. I don’t know what his intentions were or if he might have been under the influence of something, but I wasn’t going to let this continue. I said he could remain in our lobby for a little while since it was cold outside but if he started bothering other customers or employees, he would have to leave. He wandered around for a few minutes and then left without saying anything else.

I painted the background in 2018 or 2019 when I was starting to experiment with abstraction but I didn’t do anything else with this canvas board until now. I based the design of the strange guy off of the monsters from the book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak not because I thought the guy looked strange, but the monsters were the first things to come to my mind when I thought of the word “strange”. The messed up musical notes represent this guy’s “singing”. The image of the iPhone and wi-fi in the corner represent his desire to film. I used every letter in the English alphabet (and some more than once) and intentionally distorted them to symbolize the nonsense this guy was “singing”. The other symbols ($ ; ! ? #. @) were highlighted in red to represent some of the expletives he was using. I don’t really know why I painted a clock in the corner. I wanted something there so that this particular corner wasn’t empty and I guess I couldn’t come up with anything else.

I painted this in January 2024 but I accidentally put ” ’23 ” on the front.