33-Oprah3
©2010 Craig Ashby
Mixed media on masonite.
10″ x 7″

So here I am at the end of this 33 painting series with a final Oprah Winfrey. The final of this three is a color composite photographic top layer of rainbows and a derelict building in the Hudson River, among other things. I wanted to go out with screaming eye-popping color overdose. Check. Goal met.

Running the primarily African ethnographic art gallery all those years really distorted my perception. The first thing I noticed mostly in the textiles was how a lot of what I was seeing didn’t allow your eye to rest. The western notion of background and foreground were not the same. Quilts and textiles that were so multilayered and repaired over generations you couldn’t let your eyes or mind rest while looking at them. Queue the Looney Tunes light bulb above my head.

There are so many tiny points I love in this one. The Penn Station arrival and departure board in her hair. The aforementioned derelict building prominent around the third eye. The Diesel logo on the lower right which makes me giggle a bit. And the overall homogeneity of color and destruction across the entire piece is exciting. It finishes this series perfectly.