Emperor
©1997 Craig Ashby
12.25″ x 17.25″
Mixed Media

Emperor is one of the few pieces that have survived my early days of moving to New York City. It was an extremely dark time predicated on a desperate move. It took tremendous amounts of energy to work on nothing but tea and crackers, much less work on art.

The good/superficial side of this was that one of my bosses at the time thought I was so skinny I must be doing drugs. Oddly, the cost of rent in New York caused me to do less drugs than I have ever done in my life. Just another thing I have done exactly opposite than the majority. I sobered up in New York City.

So I was working a few jobs. Waiting tables. Working display design freelance positions. And this piece came about. I knew from previous experiments that I could remove all of the paper from a piece coated in gel medium. I wanted to create a stained glass experiment with Emperor.

This piece is mostly see through in reality. Little bits of trapped paper remain and show as discolored bits. But in the end it’s just printed ink and gel medium.

The image itself is another example of my precognitive abilities. Some of the shots surrounding the central figure are of the World Trade Center from a spread in Interview magazine. From these exploding building facades comes this alien penguin.

Many times I have discussed how I am not always in control of the creation. It just starts happening and many times you can’t even remember how you moved the idea through the process. It’s like waking from an intense dream.