Location
"Cadavre Exquis Drawing #465" (community and collaboration)
Document Type
Poster
Start Date
22-8-2024 12:00 AM
End Date
31-12-2024 12:00 AM
Description
Corey Johnson
Muppetiki, 2023
Fandom: The Muppets
Oil painting on black velvet
31 x 25 in
Collection of the artist
Rating: General Audiences
Tags: star wars, john wilde, george lucas, family drama, identity, cinema, space, watercolor, gouache, princess leia, darth vader, death star, millenium falcon, collage
Creator's notes: Based on a photo-card from the 80s and reinterpreted through black velvet and tiki culture, this painting shows The Muppets enjoying some tropical cocktails at a tiki bar, framed in an elaborately kitschy ornate gold frame trimmed with red velvet.
Muppetiki
"Cadavre Exquis Drawing #465" (community and collaboration)
Corey Johnson
Muppetiki, 2023
Fandom: The Muppets
Oil painting on black velvet
31 x 25 in
Collection of the artist
Rating: General Audiences
Tags: star wars, john wilde, george lucas, family drama, identity, cinema, space, watercolor, gouache, princess leia, darth vader, death star, millenium falcon, collage
Creator's notes: Based on a photo-card from the 80s and reinterpreted through black velvet and tiki culture, this painting shows The Muppets enjoying some tropical cocktails at a tiki bar, framed in an elaborately kitschy ornate gold frame trimmed with red velvet.
Comments
Most tiki bars are highly themed. Many of them have mascots that are deeply personal to the proprietor - frequently rendered in black velvet. When I began to create my tiki bar, I knew immediately who my mascots would be - The Muppets. Tiki is a form of escape, and The Muppets are my escape from a boring, depressing world. They're the patron saints of weirdos, oddballs, and dreamers, and that's precisely the atmosphere I was looking for when creating my home bar.
The piece began as a reinterpretation of a piece of photography from a Puzzle Card from the 1980s, and from there I utilized Adobe Photoshop to create a new scene using the original pose. I then sent the piece to Velvetify - an artist collective in Tijuana, Mexico that supports artists who have practiced black velvet painting since the 1960s. My piece was picked up and then reinterpreted by Argo - an artist in his 80s - who rendered my design on black velvet. From there, I chose a frame - the gaudiest I could find that also felt reminiscent of the theater from The Muppet Show, and hung it in a place of honor in my tiki bar.
The piece is not the painting itself - it is the process - the process of loving the Muppets, the process of loving tiki, the process of evolving of an image from original inspiration to sketch to final product, with each iteration touched and transformed by someone else's hand.