Portrait of a woman about to be abducted by aliens.
Or possibly, “Potato lady being called back to the potato mother ship.”
Or, “Ophelia hits her head on a rock.”
The jury is still out on the deeper meaning of this picture. Its small size indicates that it’s probably not the work of one of the pre-Raphaelite masters, as they tend to use bigger canvases and finished their pictures with a high-gloss, transparent glaze. We may be wrong, and have consulted the one remaining art historian who still speaks to us after the incident with the Margaret Keane knock-off painting, and some people just will not admit when they’re wrong.
Anyway…there’s something about this piece…yeah, it’s crazy simple, possibly left unfinished because the artist stopped caring–about the painting, about anything–and even your mom wouldn’t love it because it was something you made. Moms have standards, too. All that considered, there’s something compelling that just begs for interpretation. “Woman’s head peaking out of tree?” “The Assumption of a farm-fresh barn egg?”
And then there’s the way the oval seems to follow you around the room. It’s creepy.
Anyway…
So, this one was a LOT funnier when I found it last year, during the endless news stories about the oil disaster in the gulf of Mexico. I was all, “Ooh, tarballs!”
But there’s so much more going on here than tarballs. I’ll let you know when I figure out what that “so much more” is. It may be that there’s nothing at all going on here except tarballs. I’ll accept that.
It looks just a bit like God dropped His celestial screwdriver when he was trying to fix Uranus’s rotation, and it left this huge “ding” somewhere in New Mexico. At least it’d be easy to find, it’s next to the green bit.
Although if it WAS New Mexico, you’d think they would have fewer tarballs.
I know it’s not Texas. While the overall look is pretty close to my home state–barren and lifeless, with a comical little smudge of green pasted in at the last minute by a lazy god who was, frankly, tired of dirt–it’s not Texas. We don’t have tarballs, they spontaneously combust.
“Potato Called to the Mother Ship” from Goodwill on 2222, Austin. “Tarballs” from Salvation Army on 1325 near La Frontera, Round Rock.
One Response to “Minimalist Dance Party”
Now I will not be able to get the word tarballs out of my head. Thanks!