Painting Journal

Hey everyone!

My painting is an abstraction of the Nike corporation. To start, I thought about how much I hate corporations. I don't use the word "hate" very often, except for the casual, "Aw I hate mosquitoes", or "Man, I really hate 'High School Musical' and everything associated with it". That sort of thing. Back to corporations, I have such strong negative feelings towards corporations, especially ones as pervasive as Nike and friends, because they force themselves into our lives. We unknowingly give so much of ourselves to corporations, even if we do not buy their products directly.
Furthermore, I find it incredibly disheartening that 99% of what I own is mass-produced. Nothing is unique. The shirt that I'm wearing, the shoes on my feet (which are Nikes), even my blessed, blessed paint brushes, all are mass produced. Things one considers to be their little individuality-identifiers are not all that individualizing after all. Ahh, such is life. The only true belongings are ones that are born of your own creation.

For the painting, I wanted to boil down what I think corporations like Nike do to our society. They consume. They entice. They control. And yet their atrocities go unnoticed. For me, this painting is nothing more than an abstraction of these aspects.


Post-critique response:

I liked the way the critique went. I was happy that the subject was not totally clear, because I was trying to break completely from any representation. Glad to hear that people got a sense of production and industrial qualities. I think that the whole 'not sharing any information until later' structure to the critique complemented the abstract assignment well because people reacted to the paintings without any priming to the subject of the work.