FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| VISUAL ARTS TERENCE KINSELLA:
DIRTY PICTURES AND THE JOB OF POETRY I started to laugh. The painting "Consider the Leering Man" has the word "leer" lettered on red beside - guess what? - the face of a man leering at a naked woman. The joke continues: the snake of penetration, the breasts and the collapsing phallic symbol. "The clues are all there," says artist Terence Kinsella. The pleasure of decoding it is like reading poetry. The metaphors for sex are recognizable clichés from popular culture. Just in case it seems serious, look at our lecherous hero's Mickey Mouse-like shorts and shoes. Using Monty Pythonesque humor in this and other works, Kinsella portrays sagging pickles for the older male, the open flower for the vagina, and screws for "screwing." Can you read this? Kinsella purposely focuses on the theme of sex because he feels that everyone has a stake in it, and art is about human experience. "(The arts) mirror that experience in some way to let us understand it better," he says. Using a shared human experience such as sex, the artist encourages the viewer to respond with, "Aha! That's like my life." Archetypal metaphors are seen as everyday images from popular culture mediums such as magazines, computers, clip-art, parenting guides, illustration books, '50s design, op art patterns, medical illustrations and even his own photographs. "Everything goes. There's no one right way. I enjoy taking from everywhere," he says. It's a jumble, like the chaos of our lives. The orchestrator is Kinsella, as he picks his images and recombines them in a mixed media technique using oil paints on acrylic backgrounds with line drawings, screen printing, ink drawing, coloring and realism. With post-modern flourish, his ideas are combined with other people's ideas, like juxtaposing the glazy texture of his own photograph of a dried leaf against the hard-edged line drawings of pickles in "Goodbye Sexual Prowess." These schematic Japanese illustrations are clear, crisp, disciplined and pared down. Is this an attempt to simplify, to add clarity to our cluttered lives? Labor-intensive painting reveals high craftsmanship in textures and flatness, bright colors and off-set graphic cartoonish images. How can you not grin at the Western bad guy as hero wearing feminine panties with hearts, and holding a phallic-shape gun squirting semen in "Bad Apple/Chick Magnet"? Or the bad drawing in "Empowered Woman" of the couple copulating, where he is grinning and obviously into it, but the woman is mentally somewhere else, thinking of buying a truck? Close study of the large 45-inch by 45-inch painting "Artist Conception" with textured background and a child-like drawing of a face reveals some hidden surprises. The man kissing the woman's stomach swirls through the French horn leading to impregnation and birth of another artist who is responsible for the happy face with raised eyebrows. Art mirrors life. |
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