Gluttony (1994) - Pencil on paper, ink and white out on paper, acrylic on canvas

      Every picture tells a story, the story behind my first ever dual image work falls on the raw side but it served to inspire and therefore deserves to be told.  I was at the time working for a printing company in Florida as a folder operator, the job entailed taking large sheets of paper and feeding them through a machine that folded them into brochures or pages of magazines, I worked second shift and it was a decent job.  The company I worked for would hire 'temps' to handle the more menial tasks like boxing stuff up or collating pages, if you have ever worked with 'temps' you know they are a different breed of cat.

      I was walking into the restroom when one of the temps, a big guy named 'Dave', was walking out.  He was holding a small butter tub half full of powder in his hands, knowing this couldn't be good I asked what it was anyway.  He told me it was cornstarch and that it was real absorbent, I had only ever used corn starch to thicken up gravy... I guess he saw my puzzled look because that was when he said "I got this rash".  I did not need to hear anymore, the quick visual of a sweaty fat man making ass gravy had me wishing I could poke out my minds eye, I had to get the image out of my head so I went home and started drawing.

      Below is the original 2"x2" design sketch for my first ever dual image artwork, the sketch was the easy part and I drew it in under twenty minutes, finishing it however wasn't so quick.  Started in 1994 and originally titled 'Glutton Guzzling Gravy' it took over 10 years on and off messing with the image before I was finally satisfied enough to call it done.

      Below is the photocopy first draft that was enlarged, darkened around the edges with a marker and touched up with a white colored pencil.

      The image was then re-photocopied larger onto 8.5"x11" paper in 1995 and touched up with Sharpie marker and White-Out.

      Still not entirely satisfied with the image it is again altered and made larger still in 2001, this time painted in acrylic on a 3'x5' canvas, the photograph is below.

      That image was then cleaned up so that all the black lines were closed together using image editing software in 2003 and at the time I thought I was finally finished...

      Finished enough anyway to have them laser cut into mirror finished acrylic computer fan grill covers that honestly came out great, sadly I have not yet put these grills to good use.

      Flash forward three years, 2006 and I think I finally got it right.  I shortened the legs and cleaned things up again to make it more correctly proportioned, now it looks more like a skull and a guy eating out of a bowl at the same time better.  This was my first and is still my favorite of all the paranoiac works I've done so far, which is why it changed so many times before calling the following dual image finished.

Gluttony