"Good Guy With A Gun" - a vaguely moral painting

"Good Guy With A Gun" is a painting I made earlier this month. It is a 24"x30" acrylic painting on canvas. This painting is part of a new series I am working on called "Sufferin' Succotash." The idea behind this series is partly a meditation on vaguely moral cliche and the implication of violence or misunderstanding that results from it and how that can be communicated through surrealism.

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In this painting I use symbols and imagery that hints at what "Good Guy With A Gun" could mean. The eponymous Good Guy in this instance would be Yosemite Sam. Cowboys are a longstanding archetype of heroism in the United States. Yosemite Sam is my cartoonish figurehead for that archetype. I choose him instead of, say, a Clint Eastwood type, because I think this sheds light on how your average person evaluates the severity of violence in the name of righteousness.

I use hints of his likeness throughout the painting in various stages of disarray, his facial features contorting from what could look like anger, to happiness, to barely there. Our hot-headed good guy is firing his gun into the air into a cartoonish puff of gunpowder which seemingly is echoed in the overall amorphous shape that he exists in himself.

"Sufferin' Succotash" is part of a larger series that will be called "Highway Hypnosis" which in turn is under the umbrella of a larger group, a series of series, I like to call "Paper Town."

I've never fully explained this series publicly, but I look forward to using this new blog/steemit/social media thing to further explore this idea with y'all.