wayvy weekly //// [what’s Project 152?]
What’’s wayvy baby? Welcome back to wayvydon.com. I hope you had an excellent week since we were last able to sit down together like this. Today, we are going to change gears a little bit and focus more squarely on some art over the next month or so.
So, for the month of June, I have committed to creating 5 paintings a day every day. We’re a little over halfway through and I realized that I am terrible at marketing and nobody will know what I am doing if I am not extremely obnoxious about it. So here we are. I’M DOING 152 PAINTINGS IN A MONTH AND YOU CAN SEE THE LIVE UPDATING COLLECTION IN THE KWAM VALLERY @ WAYVYWORKS.
For those OGs among us, you will remember I did the same Project 2 years ago, which were where the pieces in the Kwam Vallery were featured from. Those pieces were primarily inspired by Playboy, American Art from the 80’s and some personal musings. Over the past two years I have continued to hone my craft in preparation for another Project 150. This series is much more overtly political than the first, with some carefully considered criticisms of capitalism and american culture. Avoiding the easy poppy and candy like quality of Playboy images, I decided to dig a little deeper, using images from National Geographic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Math Textbooks, Speeches from Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr and references from Renaissance Art, Paul Klee, comic books, philosophy, multiple religions, youth culture and city living. It is my hope to combine all of these disparate seemingly unrelated ideas on one canvas to help us see how intricately interrelated every field of study is and, with some creative ideation, how one can recontextualize these tools in order to solve the more existential issues that face our society today. I hope you guys enjoy my humble offerings! I will continue to update wayvyworks as the collection grows and I can’t wait to hear what you guys react to. Art is nothing without an audience, so I look forward to the conversations we’ll have surrounding these 152 pieces. Stay wayvy <3.
KEEP THAT MASK ON
For the wayvywork of the week this time around, we have KEEP THAT MASK ON featured. This is one of my favourite pieces from the first crop of paintings (available to view here) due to its simplicity combined with intense erratic energy. The figure feels very grounded and certain, but the colours around him are dancing and vibrating with such an energy that contrasts the deadpan stare of the subject extremely well. I love how confrontational the piece is, the almost spastic pastel on the shoes which give off an almost satirical 90s anime sneaker vibe and of course the leafy plant our protagonist is sheltered under. The spraypaint and pastel mix for a galactic looking background which place this figure in a much more ethereal or divine position than would have otherwise been possible, especially when coupled with the quiet determination communicated in his face, but particularly his eyes. If I was to improve this piece I may have but a yellow floor to contrast and ground the figure a little more, but I also like how it feels like he’s floating in some kind of liminal space. Is he an angel? a god? a demon? we can’t say for sure, but what we can say is that he wayvy.
