[br] [br] “First Love” Colored pencil on board, self made frame, deer skin, stained and whip stitched rawhide binding. 33″h x 42″w…
This drawing was the first one in the series of body coverings, “Art as Fashion/ Fashion as Art”, that I did. My childhood baseball glove was soon to be the inspiration for a series of works, developing an idea, that presented iconographic Americana imagery.
The glove was mine when I was 8 years old. After a long trip through the family it was returned when everybody else had out grown it. I was thrilled to get it back some thirty years later. It was this “thing” that was so overwhelmingly important to me as kid I took with me wherever I went. I slept with it too, and therefore, it became my “First Love”.
The glove alone, presented more like a portrait than a still life, was enough to signify what baseball meant and still does for many eight year olds. No matter how old one gets there is always and forever the memory of that first glove!
Since I thought of it as an icon it seemed a logical step to treat it in a similar manner to the traditional iconic religious, Germanic, Russian,and Greek paintings, extending its theme to the frame and encapsulating it thematically or with like material. And so began the series.
