The Surge

One of the few images I have made that refers to Katrina, this painting was featured in the two-person show Jeanne and I were in last December at The Joanna. It's about the devastating storm surge caused by Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, and all of the chaos and confusion that followed both in my life and in the New Orleans area.
Why all of the candy colors and cute lil' critters, then? Well, because for me, Katrina marked the end of a very long childhood, or child-like existence, and the beginning of my having to deal with the harsh realities of adult life. It was the surging flood water that decimated the bedroom sanctuary I inhabited at my dad's house, that took all of my trinkets and my toys, and splayed them all about with the water, filth, and toxic sludge that was waiting for me upon my return from Houston. Sitting on top of the muck were pages that were ripped out of every comic book I owned, pages that I had once perused again and again in my ample leisure time, now torn form their bindings and rearranged by the deluge.
It was the dishevelled collection of a pathetic man-child who needed the harsh slap of Katrina's wet hand to start acting his age and assume responsibility for his own life. This cartoon-colored monstrosity of a painting is an admittance of that.
There are bits in the composition that were borrowed from other sources, such as the Neptune that came from an old National Geographic illustration, the "wonderwall" graphic from the 1984 World's Fair in New Orleans, and the psychedelic pin ball machine backdrop from a 1970's Sesame Street animated sequence. The former is a symbol of the awesome wrath that demolished my hometown of Chalmette, and the latter two are tokens of the youth that was washed away by the storm surge.