When I started this project, I just started making art.
I didn't think about any activism.
I was taking care of my own questions, but it is a political piece and it does generate
conversation, and when I decided to commit myself to it, that was part of my reason to
take it on as a long-term project is it had the ability to generate conversations, and
to generate conversations, so I became an activist in a way.
My grandpa was an activist and, as I recall, wrote letters to the editor every single day
in Des Moines to the Register and Tribune.
That was his response to conversation generating, so I guess I grew up with people who, both
my mom and grandmother were schoolteachers, so there's always been a culture of volunteerism
and activism in my family, so I'm not uncomfortable with that roll.
I brought in some plates that I recently painted from different states, so Virginia is unusual.
It's number 2 behind Texas.
There's not much choice.
The menus usually decline a meal or they ask that the content not be released, so there's
very few Virginia menus with specific requests.
I think they've done that to keep not having a lot of attention about their high numbers
of executions as opposed to Texas, so this is the largest plate I've painted.
21 Sept. 2011, and this was the last Texas meal request, there's text on the meal on
the back as the well, I can read.
After this large request was not eaten, Texas stopped allowing final meal selections.
All future inmates served standard prison fare.
Another plate that I brought in is a Virginia menu for cubed, it actually says fried steak
diced into little squares.
You can't have a knife, of course, because you might hurt yourself, so it was cut up
into little pieces and then put back together like a puzzle, that's been done a couple times,
and this was served in a styrofoam box for this Virginia 1990 menu, and on the back is
the description of the meal and some of the information about the execution.
This is writing is by poem is by Robert Johnson who is a law professor at American University
who worked with this client and attended the execution, so I wanted to include that writing.
I'm a painting by training.
There's paintings in this office I've done, but most recently I've combined my love of
narrative painting, different from the last supper piece, which is more illustrating the
final meals.
My studio year is about half and half.
Half spent on the final meals, and half spent on lighter projects, so it's currently lighter-project
time of year, and I, after encouragement from Clay, I combined the two mineral painting
or China painting as it's commonly called with the painting.
This is some examples of that, so this is a self-portrait on a found plate, so the bird
was already there, and this is actually a church that was already there, and I added
the woman.
These are personal narratives that maybe me and my family would know on those two, and
this is a story about bananas, so this one ties in a little to the Last Supper being
foot, but it's not about capital punishment, and this is my mother-in-law's four-inch heels.
So it's actually been really freeing to explore a new material.
Narrative painting has been done by a lot of people, but there's not a lot of narrative
China painters out there that I've seen, so I actually feel like this is wide open and
light and a good balance for my serious projects the rest of the year.
I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Some people have asked me if I'm going to paint colored plates.
Clay sometimes nudges me, 'Why don't you try another color?'
No!
I don't want to paint in other colors.
You can't buy a cadmium red.
It would be toxic to apply the way that we apply it.
It's more of this sort of rusty color, so I couldn't do realistic colors, so I like
to limit it.
I have an idea, the first place I did was actually full color, and that's where I realized
that the cadmium.
I couldn't get the right color for ketchup, so I would have to do a monochrome, but I
have a dream that when the project ends, when we stop having capital punishment and the
project ends, this was actually Jim Fult's idea, that I would talk to some exonerated
inmates, and find out what their first meal was when they were released from prison, and
then paint a full-color meal and close the project.
That's my dream.