Lip Service - Limited Edition of 25 Print

'Lip Service', Aluminum Dye Sublimation, 80 X 144 cm (32 X 57 inches), 2018 James Rosenquist, the American pop art artist has always been a great inspiration for me. I have always admired his large scale message-laden artworks such as the 1965 ‘F-111’ and the 1981 ‘House of Fire’ where, among other things, red-hot lipsticks are aligned like a battery of cannons. These Rosenquist’s lipsticks were one inspiration for creating this work. The other being Isaiah's memorable preaching "... and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares", which takes here a somewhat modern disposition: rifle bullets are lathed, one after the other as if on a moving assembly line, only to expose the rosy lipsticks that had always been concealed inside. 'Lip Service' humbly tries to call for the need to end the Arms Race by humorously combining two extreme worlds, military service and feminine beauty, and asserting the supremacy of the latter. To achieve the goal behind the artwork, a couple of similar-shaped objects have been chosen: A rosy lipstick on the one hand and a rifle bullet on the other. These bullets are being lathed and while the metal chips scatter all over, the lipsticks that were always hidden inside the bullets, waiting to be released, are revealed and exposed to the world. Beauty wins military service - make love not war. My artworks are usually about uncanny compositions, featuring inconceivable, yet fantastic realities which are portrayed employing dazzling colors and razor-sharp details. These fantastic realities cannot happen in our real world but only within my mind and consequently in my computers, where they are conceived, designed, fashioned, textured, painted and finally photographed. In addition, I usually create my artworks by first producing a short footage around the painting's theme and then I choose one frame, which I later turn to be the final still artwork. The present painting is actually one frame that I have chosen among 250 frames that constitute the footage. It seems to me that the present artwork fairly represents my artistic practice.