Two summers ago I attempted to revive a robot series I had originally started in the '80s. That series was made by folding an 8.5x11-inch sheet of copy paper and cutting out half of a robot face with an X-Acto knife. This created a stencil of a perfectly symmetrical robot face once the sheet of paper was unfolded. The plan was to use the stencil to spray paint "robots" throughout NYC. This was the era of graffiti artists like Keith Haring and Jean Mitchell Basquiat (aka SAMO). But I never followed through on the graffiti plan, being against vandalism.* (But I did try, without success, to get a similar series into the Fun Gallery where both Haring and Basquiat exhibited at the time.) As I was saying, in the summer of 2019, I decided to revive this robot series, but on a large scale. (54x66 inches) The painting, as seen in the photo on the left, still used paper as a stencil. I had simply rolled black house paint over the stencil and onto the stretched canvas. The image on the right is the result.** I made six of these black and white paintings and posted them on Instagram before deciding the project looked outdated. So I took down the IG photos and stored the paintings away. Then last weekend, I suddenly got the inspiration to update these robot paintings. Earlier in the week I was thinking of using Paul Klee as an artist to appropriate. (Part of my standard operating procedure.) As my artist statement explains, I like to take an early modern artist and speculate what kind of art they'd be making if they lived in our era of Post-Modernism and Neo-Conceptualism. I had googled Klee and browsed his WikiArt list of paintings and saw his Senecio painting. It stuck in my mind as a possible springboard into something interesting. But it wasn't until a few days later that – “out of the blue” – I suddenly got the inspiration to take down from off the wall one of the b/w robot paintings I still had hanging around and turn it into a "synergized" Paul Klee! The result can be seen in 1st photo in the upper left. * Footnote 1: But I did once paste up advertisement posters over other posters throughout SoHo in 1975 for Joseph Kosuth. The "dirty deed" (literally) got me and a fellow SVA art student listed as assistants in Art & Language's first issue of THE FOX! ** Footnote 2: Yes, I painted directly over the b/w painting from the summer of 2021. As usual, I’ll be making at least eight of these paintings for the series I’m currently calling Space Robots.
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Steven A. Martin, artist Archives
January 2024
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