And here’s why.

You don’t want to be this, do you? A young Johnnie Depp, but with Catherine Zeta-Jones’s lips? Nobody wants that.

Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure this isn’t actually endorsing drugs on some level. I mean, she, or possibly he, maybe it–has really managed to slim down. True, there’s the grotesque facial distortion, but it’s a look Joan Rivers seemed to strive for, up until her death.

Yes, she’s still on TV, but the vital functions ceased in the mid-90s. They only animate her for brief “Hollywood Squares”-type appearances, and the occasional guest spot on Sesame Street.

The jury is out on what the complicated arrow thingies portend. They strongly resemble the international , at least the death metal and RenFest chaos, not the particle physics chaos. I’m not sure what Mr. Depp thinks about them. He appears to be introducing them, Vanna White style. “Heeeerre’s Chaos!” *polite applause*

Drugs make you litter. If you take drugs, you’ll end up leaving deflated blue footballs all over a strange periwinkle void.

Plus, you’ll look like Crawford’s screen test for “The Crow.” She would have totally gotten it, but, you know, fallen arches.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

Mixed media is SUPPOSED to look like that.

Not too many people are bold enough to work in tinfoil, chewing gum, snot and industrial springs this decade. I understand gum and hardware was a major art movement in France in the 1940s, before the abstract expressionists ruined it by throwing great buckets of paint all over everything. It really destroyed the subtlety of the mucus. Tragic, really.

I understand this was loosely based on the artist’s relationship with his mother, and loosely based on Chernobyl, with just a little bit of inspiration from the amazing Lithuanian gold-medal discus throw at the Athens Olympics. Just look at that strong sense of motion. The athlete’s muscles bunching and coiling like…oh, never mind.

We are not ruling out the possibility that this is a deeply errant attempt to raise awareness for National Breast Cancer Prevention month, but we would ask that the artist strictly limit himself to little pink ribbons in the future.

The camera pauses for a moment, and zooms back to reveal the grandeur of…hmm. I think we’re back to Chernobyl again, or some other blasted, hellish wasteland, the conceptual opposite of a treasure map, roads that lead only to…pink.

Traveler, find another road.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

But I am tending toward the latter.

This may be one of those strange pictures where you spend four or five minutes looking at it, and then suddenly you see that it’s actually a negative space image of talk show host Jimmy Fallon interviewing  a late Victorian era pants press, and you have an almost transcendent moment of not really caring

In fact, I hope that’s what it is. Otherwise, I have to assume that it’s a quick picture of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of mummification, experiencing a painful, yet strangely contemplative, bowel movement. And I’m pretty sure I can’t handle that right now.

With a tricky color scheme like this, black, red halos, hovering in a minty-green void, the silvery dribbles could mean, well, anything. In this case, I believe they represent an abundance of icing drizzled forth upon this god of the underworld by a benevolent, if somewhat arbitrary, Horus. I want to think this because I’ve read Egyptian creation stories, and a generous helping of icing is better than any possible alternative.

Interpretation #2: A still from the opening credits of the new James Bond film, “Live and Let Shed,” where MI6 tells 007 that the nuclear weapon plans were stolen by a tribe of dog-headed people hiding in the far corners of the 1980′s. When thrift stores get all abstract-expressionist, it’s hard to tell exactly.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

I wanted to express the sheer vastness of this piece. If you’re going to throw a combination of mustard, blue tempera paint, and bird droppings at a canvas in an attempt to express some emotion that really would take a 16-syllable German word to get across, you really need to aim big.

I only regret that my shoulder is blocking out such a big portion of the image. Trust me, I thought of sitting about six inches to the left, the entire thing would have made sense. It would sing. Because there was a swirl of dirty yellow with a bit of teal behind me that totally held the entire thing together.

In the all-Goodwill remake of “2001″, this is what the monkeys find. And that version is I think a vast improvement because the human race develops the 99-cent sale before it discovers simple machines–and really, why invent the lever to kill a gazelle when you could just do it with really, really bad artwork?–but more importantly, it’s 45 minutes shorter.

So, if you ever want to pick up something that takes up too much space, is in terrible taste, is cheap, and screams “god, what was I thinking?”, you can find me on the floor of Goodwill.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

Honestly, the whole world of “high school art” generally just makes me a little bit sad, rarely does it ever actually frighten me. But I think we’re edging there now.

Mainly because I’m feeling like this might actually be some strange religious icon–”rapture of the dead pigeon,” or Pigiata. And if that’s the case the artist may have actually out-weirded the Unitarian Universalists, and that takes some effort.

Not sure what it is. But pretty sure you’re not supposed to feed it after midnight. Or really ever, feeding it might just encourage it. It’s bad enough that it’s a nightmarish bastard crossbreed of a care bear, Ross Perot, and a necrotic penguin, you don’t want to feel vaguely responsible for it somehow.

After the bird apocalypse, the last thing the starving, desperate members of the human race saw was this thing drifting over the horizon in a silent, still mockery of flight. The  particularly superstitious or foolish or Unitarian Universalist among them tried to placate it with worship. There is no more terrible way to die than a 700-gallon bird poopie.

Bird? Fly? Mouse?

Birdflymouse?

We don’t know either, but we think we saw this on “Ren and Stimpy” when we were much, much younger. Saturday morning cartoons were far, far too dark for us, and we longed for the blessed silence of televised golf.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin. 

Pity the penguin drawn by a six-year-old. It is well beyond flightless and into the realm of the pathologically antiaerodynamic.

You may have noticed, Benjamin’s vision of a penguin is uniquely round. We assume that the loss of penguin life to sea lions and the Inuit people is astonishing. One penguin could feed a small village–of Inuit, not sea lions, which do not have villages as far as we know–for a week.

They do not swim. They are, however, buoyant. During their hatching season, they fill the waves with bobbing like a remedial soccer class practicing on an aircraft carrier. It’s magic. The sea lions think so, too.

Personally I don’t think Benjamin has seen very many penguins, except that one that fell off a building and killed his sister.

This particular penguin has decided it is NOT going to be eaten by sea lions or the Inuit, and has picked up a spiked helmet and shoulder pads from the Antarctic Murderbowl team. It won’t help, because the poor thing is as round and succulent as a Butterball turkey stuffed with bacon, but it’s nice that it puts up a brave front.

Savers on Burnet and North Loop, Austin

Thesis #1: part of the experience of being an Artist (do not capital “a”) is not being understood.
Thesis #2: part of the experience of being a teenager is not being understood.

If these two states are additive, then a high school artist would be completely unintelligible. If, however, we’re in the “two wrongs make a right” and “two rights make a left” school of thought, then high school art would tend to be completely transparent. I really think this time around that’s more the case.

Now please put on some Depeche Mode (what, too dated?), a black tee shirt, and don’t speak to your parents for three months, or you just won’t be in the right headspace to appreciate this.

Not only do you not understand me, the trees, also, do not understand me. Behold, I turn my back on nature. Pleasant rolling hills with a small creek, and lofty pines, I deny you. You will not intrude on my endless solitude. In fact, just to nail down my outsider status, I have coated myself thoroughly in RustOleum brand black board paint. Once you have used me, please erase your work so that I can be utterly, utterly empty for my next user.

Woe.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

No, it’s not asparagus. This is 1)  next  year’s “Mr. July” from “Men of Houndstooth,” 2) a shepherd, or 3) a textbook example of why you shouldn’t needlepoint in the same color as your backing material. Surprisingly, the answer is “Mr. July,” which is not to say that there’s some truth to #2 and #3. Because white sheep on a white background become strange, ghostly creatures that resemble points of hellish blue radiance staring out of the dark void of space.

gaze into the sheep…

Not knowing much about sheep, I’m unsure if those are big black ears, or flippers. The poor thing could be shoved upside down, waving its phalanges about in the air trying to right itself, for all I know. Being amorphous clouds of white on white, they work equally well upside down as right side up. Not very, either way. Free yourself, little sheep!

What an odd little gnome. I’d give good money to know what you call that sort of sweeping man-skirt he’s wearing. It’s rather bell-like, or merrily conical.  And he’s found another one of those void-sheep I see. This one’s spiralling out of the infinite darkness to feed on his elbow. Better you than us, brave shepherd.

Not even sheep respect a shoe like that. Granted, the lift he gets when he plays hacky-sack with the corner kids is phenomenal, but you really only see that kind of toe in the magical worlds of Renaissance Festivals and needlepoint. Please don’t wear that. The sheep keep snickering.

Savers, South Lamar, Austin

I like the fact that, after this thing escaped from Edward Gorey’s bedside endtable, it took the time to get its nails done. That’s how you know it’s a classy knob. Thing. Possibly fandangle. It’s certainly elegant, it’s got the curves of a 1940s Hollywood musical starlette. Particularly if her upper half was made out of lime “jolly ranchers” and fractured in a freak pas de deux accident.

On the other hand, it may actually be a lounge singer from the Mos Eisley Cantina. And maybe she wasn’t made of jolly ranchers. Maybe that’s her only functioning eye, and I’m judging her. If so, I’m sorry, and George Lucas  did a terrible thing to you. To all of us.

Does it make any more sense from this angle? No? Okay.

One thing that really bugs me about this is that the green nub is like 3 degrees off of symmetric. It’s…really empissing. Why? WHY?

That, dear, is probably an end.

I know that macro photography is kind of a “thing,” you can get any number of things blown up to hideously large scale with the click of a search button. But the fleshy pinkness of the balloon, the twisted little umbilicus knot, it looks like some strange pro-life advertisement. “Think before you pop…choose inflation.”

Uh…thingie…from Texas Thrift near I35 and 51st, balloon butt from Salvation Army on 1325 near Round Rock

At some point in time, not too awful long after the Thirteen Colonies, there was some divergent evolution in the flag department.

It was more or less around the time that Martha’s Vineyard became the nation’s capital, that was when things went a little cattywumpus. The 76 colonies had just declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire, giving Mustafa III the finger in the event that historians would later call “The Boston Dolmas Party.” In the new flag, each colony would be represented by a grape leaf, one that was open instead of filled with a tasty blend of rice, onions, and mint–this showed how the colonies were open to a new future, instead of being stuffed.

The seventeen stripes have evolved over time–originally there was only two stripes, the same red as the Ottoman Flag, to remind the colonies of their past and of the hard war they had fought–or at least the terrible and unconscionable tariffs on za’atar imposed by the sultanate. However, they eventually became oddly curved and densely packed, representing the intersection of VFW Highway and Bridge Street, to celebrate how that famous intersection stood at the turning point of the Revolutionary War, causing a massive 87-cart, 14-horse, and two-boat collision that caused both French and Turkish armies to be two weeks late to the Battle of Bunker Hill.

True story.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin