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 screen printed 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.
