Impatientism

by J Randall & R Wisdom

1' x 2'
Acrylic & Crayon on Canvas
2007

$280




C.E. Gogh is the insidious leader of the anti-globalization union private equity underground.  He sits at the table of his basement corner office smoking cigarettes and plotting the next embargo.

Ray began the painting by sketching John with an oil crayon on the 1' x 2' canvas that Ray long ago vowed he would make into a portrait.  John sat idly by while Ray sketched.  When he saw his likeness on the canvas he remarked, "That's actually not a bad sketch."  But he knew how to make it better—paint it in.  The duo instantly launched into a pseudo-impatientist background and fill-in session in which Ray painted in the table, the cigarettes on the table, somebody's phone, an ashtray, and a couple of orange chairs.  John added warrior face paint — subtle, subversive, and negotiation-proof — to the C.E. Gogh's face.  From there he stitched in a green tie and a green outline of the Gogh's shirt before he then began dropping huge amounts of pink gray and white on the walls behind C.E. Gogh and with a brush added a Van Gogh-style wallpaper encircling the C.E. Gogh, attune to his every insurgent thought.  Ray then managed to create a beautiful periwinkle type blue to serve as his carpet but also, when considered with the chair, evokes a sunset scene, as one would see from the Inner Bay in the San Francisco area.  Is this the location of C.E. Gogh's ultra-top-secret hideout?  No one knows, no one could say if he knew.

Now and then denizens of the Bay Area will claim to have seen the C.E. Gogh.  As in, Have you seen the C.E. Gogh?  His status is mythical, like Sasquatch or Amelia Earhart.

by J Randall, P Williams, &
R Wisdom

2' x 3'
Acrylic on Canvas
2007

What we have here is the first three-way impatientist painting.  John, Ray, & Phil are old comrades, going back a long ways to the mid-nineties when they were barely even shaving.  They convened the session that spawned "Exit 74" in John's attic at about two o'clock in the morning.  They were tipsy on cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Phil was reeling from a Notre Dame loss in the Sugar Bowl.  But these mere trifles of life weren't about to interfere with some good old-fashioned impatientist painting.  This was Phil's first brush with impatientism but he performed beautifully.

It is a fairly large canvas for impatientist painting.  The trio actually had only five colors to work with: mars black, titanium white, cerulean blue, hansa yellow, and a cadmium red.  What is remarkable about "Exit 74" is that the artists managed to pull out so many different colors from the basic palette.  The greens in the middle, the grays in the lower right corner, the oxide reds of the lower right corner, the flaming reds and yellows at the top, and everything in between.

It was likely Ray that executed the three-fingered swoosh working its way down from the top right into the middle, giving the painting a prominent and forceful personality.  The patchwork at the lower left is distinctive and unusual; someone, we're not sure who, had to have been adding those numerous small strokes while the other two artists were busy mixing and swooshing on the rest of the canvas.

The painting right now sits atop Ray's fireplace in the McKinley Heights neighborhood of St. Louis.  However, Phil has a claim on the painting as soon as he moves to St. Louis.