These works, all of which are oil on newsprint, explore the humorous incongruity between the speed and disposability of the newspaper and the glacial labor of painting.  Rupert Murdoch can print and circulate his perverse conservative ideology 1.2 million times per day in The Sun.  My tabloid Hot Nun has its own perversion: a titillating world where the only news is “hot nun” repeated ad infinitum.  It has a circulation of one and it takes two weeks to print.  I find this irony hilarious. 

Although some of my pieces use humor to satirize serious subjects – headline sensationalism, censorship, or the RAND Corporation – I would not call them serious paintings.  They are instead memes: easily digestible jokes meant to mirror the throwaway quality of the newsprint on which they are painted.  If Warhol’s six-foot tall paintings of the New York Post elevated the newspaper headline to the status of high art, I hope that my pieces can sink the painted image down to the level of The National Enquirer.  My tabloids are to be given a brief glance at the checkout line and forgotten about a minute later. 

I am choosing to focus on the newspaper rather than a more contemporary form of media because the newspaper is itself an anachronism, a holdover from a not-too-distant past.  Formerly the fastest way of disseminating the news, the newspaper is now the slowest.  Today’s newspaper reader is making the willful choice to consume their news in a medium which is already a historical relic.  My pieces can therefore exist in an imagined past or an ironic present.