Madonna 40oz paint­ing by Chris Shaw

Acrylic on Can­vas, 2010

I designed this tra­di­tional Ortho­dox style Madonna Icon from the ground-up using geom­e­try and spe­cific geo­met­ric pro­por­tions.  It got a bit too com­pli­cated and seri­ous for my tastes and I spent a while cre­at­ing sub­se­quent draw­ings that sim­pli­fied and hid the under­laid geometry.

With all the lofty ideals present in the com­po­si­tion,  I thought I might dumb-down the image and por­tray the Madonna as if she was sell­ing a 40 ounce bot­tle of malt liquor — per­haps on TV.  Madon­nas are always sell­ing some­thing,  its just not malt liquor.  I had her pose with the bot­tle as if she were Billy Mays.  Where I live, 40oz bot­tles of malt liquor seem to be a main­stay at my local mar­ket — as is the lot­tery.  When I won $100 on a scratcher, I thought it wise to get the money in new, sequen­tial bills,  and use them as the painting’s back­ground.  The bills are laid out in a very spe­cific man­ner.  This paint­ing is a bit of an ode to my cor­ner store.

Madonna of the Tele­vi­sion paint­ing by Chris Shaw

Acrylic on Can­vas, 2010

I love Bot­ti­celli.  When I was in Italy I had the oppor­tu­nity to spend some time look­ing at the orig­i­nals,  every­thing about his paint­ings is influ­en­tial to me.  As an artist, some­times you don’t want to appro­pri­ate from a true mas­ter,  no mat­ter how good you may be, they can make you look bad.  This paint­ing is based on Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pome­gran­ite.  The orig­i­nal is truly a mas­ter­piece.  Per­haps what I like the most is how Boti­celli was obvi­ously into paint­ing beau­ti­ful women,  even if it was the Madonna,  immac­u­late mother of Jesus.  He got in a bit of hot water over this later.  If you look fur­ther into the paint­ing,  it con­tains a lot of hid­den geo­met­ric & Masonic sym­bol­ism,  every­thing from pyra­mids and the All-Seeing Eye, to cir­cles in 7 segments.

I had no inten­tion of recre­at­ing a Bot­ti­celli,  but I did want to bor­row the form and com­po­si­tion to make a new, stripped-down image.  I sub­sti­tuted the orig­i­nal baby Jesus with an ana­log tele­vi­sion, and painted the whole thing on a metal­lic gold ground with a deep amber glaze.  This paint­ing is also designed to work in a UV light environment.

Jimi Hen­drix Icon paint­ing by Chris Shaw

Acrylic on Can­vas, 2010

In early 2010 I cre­ated a lim­ited edi­tion screen­printed poster for a Hen­drix Trib­ute con­cert in San Fran­cisco.  I hand-printed the posters with Ron Dono­van of The Fire­house Kus­tom Rock Art Co. in Oak­land, Ca.  The posters were well received and I’ve been get­ting bugged to paint the image ever since.

The image is a hybrid of sev­eral clas­sic pho­tos of Jimi Hen­drix,  which I melded together and sketched to cre­ate a new image, then inked for the poster.  The base geom­e­try of this image is the pyra­mid.  While the poster is more col­or­ful, with metal­lic rays, etc.  I pre­fer the sim­plic­ity of the painting’s com­po­si­tion as is.  Its not a rock poster.  The Hen­drix image is painted on a pure red ochre ground with brings a very organic, rich, and seri­ous feel to this paint­ing.  The com­plex and razor sharp black-line brush­work adds to the effect of this painting.