This series of painting buckets started off with a bit of crass humor and metaphor, innocent really, but the series has started taking on new meaning for me. After having time to myself in the studio with these pieces, the metaphor has become that of the vessel, an object or tool to carry another from one place to another. Our cars are vessels, our bodies are vessels, and our minds are the most powerful of all vessels.
I’m not saying these buckets are our brains. That thought suddenly aligns the context more with The Wizard of Oz and the Tinman to me. Or wait, I guess that was the scarecrow…. oh well. What do these buckets represent to you?
Born from urban slang, “thirst trap” or “thirst bucket,” represents a derogatory viewpoint of someone’s character. I find this term humorous yet disturbingly titillating. When I hear it, several visuals come to mind.
As I type, I just imagine this huge bucket, bone dry with tumbleweeds bouncing around it’s dusty pale bottom. Or does this bucket contain all the excretions of said thirsty folk sitting around with tongues out all the time? It’s possibly overflowing with a flood of saliva-like water. Hot (my Paris Hilton impression).
I’ll say some might be
self-portraits,
others portraits…
Who is which?
Well, that’s half the fun…
isn’t it?
The slang context applies to a person, which is the first part of the mind f***. It’s not a “thing” any longer, or rather it’s taking the context of the person and dehumanizing them. Subjecting them to a soulless existence, so in that sense, one can grasp the degrading nature of the wordsmith’s tongue.
I mean, when was the last time you got all warm inside when someone referenced you as an inanimate object? Exactly, no one ever likes the idea of being referred to as something trivial, common, or lacking a pulse.
Then there’s the introduction of a bodily functions, then one could also go as far as to link this to a sexual context in terms of genitalia. Referencing a dry [censored]. You know what I mean.
Bucket, something to put things in. Usually one thinks of a bucket as something fairly large that holds a lot of things or material. Bringing it back to reference a loose woman, one who has had too many sexual partners and has now been cast aside for being too promiscuous.
THIRST BUCKET
Supposedly originated in the bronx and can have the following meanings; See Also Thirst.
THIRST, THIRSTY
A form of lust of or want of members of the opposite sex [or same, if you’re gay, obviously]. This term can refer to both males and females.
I had been hearing the term used a lot, thrown around social media, tv and whatnot. And it just stuck in my head, ya know? It had a certain ring to it, plus it has a hard K in it. Ask any comedian, anything with a hard K sound is gonna get a laugh.
The images began to appear in my mind. Now at the time, I was currently in my abstraction, especially smearing and pouring paint, so it came as a perfect transition back into mixing abstract and pop art. Obviously, the first image to come to mind was that of a paint bucket. Pretty BASIC too, I know. Not even realizing it, I began on the outline of the first bucket, it wasn’t until I had completed it that I realized I was instinctually re-envisioning Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans for a new generation.
