color by numbers

carla's recent posting at Art Powerlines of her coloring books has inspired me to post something i've been playing with too. The old color by numbers fun pages...

(Really, between coloring books and paint by numbers, could there be any more lazy way of teaching our kids "creativity"? But what were ya gonna do, i mean after all, we didn't have LCD monitors in the backs of the headrests to keep us entertained back then. anyway, i'm not going into that rant right now.)

so this color by no.s thing is still in the works. i had played with it for a bit a while back in the painting you see below, and i've always wanted to take it a lot further, the start of which you are seeing above... i began working with the haunting images coming out of New Orleans after Katrina, turning them into color by numbers pages.

It still feels too easy, maybe too much of a one liner (made uneasy only by how horribly beautiful the photos are). but there is something here that is a great reflection of the period in which we are living. the over simplification of issues that are so complex, the ideal images we project and the realities that won't be confined to them, flat color vs. atmosphere... on and on, there is somewhere to take this...

And i felt that Katrina is the perfect symbol for all of it. A broken levee... nature's way of painting outside the lines.

lack of imagination. 2004. oil and transfer on wood.