Tom Sawyer (washed) v.10

I titled this piece “Tom Sawyer.” It was a pretty random creation. I just saw some cutout material that I decided to paste on to a piece of paper. I had no conscious idea that the text on the cutout material I discarded from previous works included text about Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer. The character I ended up drawing in this illustration I decided would fit as an abstraction of Tom Sawyer. Moreover, it’s a name everyone has heard of. It’s also a classic American great.

I support great American art from history—when it’s good that is (by my own standards). What I’m doing here is integrating styles I’ve been working on over the years. Perhaps you’ve noticed, I haven’t been able to bridge the gap between my life arts nude drawings and paintings, and my imaginary and abstract stuff. Great art is known by a strong, relatively consistent style. Most everyone who has taken an art history class can identify a piece by Picasso for example.

Many artists have early and later periods of art. Usually a great artist’s early art is not recognized by collectors and publishers. Moreover, there are countless great artists who are not recognized much by Western media. For example, the Spanish artist, Modest Cuixart, is an artist of great fascination by myself, but I’d never heard of him before until I dug around artists of Catalan who lived in the same time period as Antoni Tapies. 

Anyhow, the styles I integrated in this piece are my stylized line art, my mosaic art, and my collage art. They came together in this piece with a composition that satiated my standard for asymmetrical balancing. My attempt at creating an illusion of space worked out well. The character is like a top spinning at the center of a large pot that has an atrium decorated with colorful and intricate mosaic pieces. 

Price for an unmatted print is: $90.00