Mark Dean Veca
Gallery Affiliations: Western Project, Cristin Tierney Gallery
Region: Pacific Coast
My paintings are both fast, and immensely slow to reveal themselves. Their monochromatic backgrounds hold an atmospheric tension, while the figures are created with thousands of lines as festering and decaying shapes, giving them a palatable presence. Drawn with India ink by hand (no digital overlays or screening), the rich details reinvent the characters as both humorous and poignant. Mirroring our cultural attitudes of greed, violence and rampant materialism, the paintings also invoke the tradition of history painting and the genre of social portraiture. In line with Goya’s court paintings and William Hogarth’s scathing satirical works, my work points to a culture gone wild; the Armor in Command uses Big Daddy Roth’s Vietnam-era hot rod imagery to evoke a war machine run amok, and Warner Brothers’ beloved cartoon graphic, “That’s All Folks!” as a cancerous colon/void for the post 9/11 world.