Summer's Coming

Summer's Coming is an expressive self-portrait painting drawing with characteristic areas of realism combined with areas of flat or patterned... more

by Michelle Flanagan

Buy the Original Drawing

Price

$800

Dimensions

25.000 x 25.000 inches

Title

Summer's Coming

Artist

Michelle Flanagan

Medium

Drawing - Stencil Oil Creme On Paper

Description

Summer's Coming is an expressive self-portrait painting drawing with characteristic areas of realism combined with areas of flat or patterned surfaces.

I rarely incorporate text in my drawings, but I was overwhelmed and driven to make a drawing about a version of Life is Like a Box of Chocolates that I heard one evening. It was from an episode of one of my favorite television series ever made, The X-Files. The episode titled, Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man (1996; #4X07), was devoted to a recurring character on that show, Cancer Man or Cigarette Smoking Man (CSM) played by actor William B. Davis.

The episode revealed background information and insight into the dark character and included a scene of him sitting alone on a bench in an alley. Disillusioned, he recites his version of Life is Like a Box of Chocolates. Cancer Man's soliloquy is brilliant: brilliantly and perfectly dry, cynical, sarcastic, ironic, and satirical. His monologue perfectly complemented the disposition of the figure already in my mind and inspired my self-portrait drawing.

Like many of my figures, she embodies themes of disillusionment, abandonment, pain, contradiction, helplessness, resentment, sadness, emptiness, deception, and disappointment.

She is not happy because summer is coming and she hates summertime: it's too hot and it seems to make so many others happy. Despite this, she is laying out, baking and melting under the glaring yellow sun.

She has been given a box of chocolates from her lover. The unoriginal, non-specific, cliche' gift from a man to woman. She doesn't even like chocolates. She holds on to it tightly because it's all she has ever been given and has left from him. She holds it tightly as evidence of his declaration of love for her. She holds on to it tightly for fear it will slip away. She holds it proudly as evidence of her worthiness. All the while she is very aware that this trophy, so placed, is melting much like the relationship she is in and she has had.

The pretty pink box of chocolates is outwardly deceiving like her relationships, for it is only upon closer inspection or intimate look where the true sentiment is revealed. The truth, pain of her reality is conceptualized through the words in Cancer Man's soliloquy Life is Like a Box of Chocolates. The truth, pain of her reality is made literal as represented by the physically aggressive and awkward way in which those words are literally carved into the surface of the drawing.

Inscribed text in Summer's Coming from Cancer Man's soliloquy, Life is Like a Box of Chocolates:

Life it's like a box of chocolates.
Cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for.
Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates.
So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped, mint crap
that you mindlessly wolf down until there's nothing else left to eat.
Sure once in a while it's a peanut butter cup English Toffee
but they're gone too fast and the taste is fleeting.
So you end up with nothing but broken bits
filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts.
If you're desperate enough to eat those all you've got left is a
is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers.

Unique to this figurative portrait drawing is its shape. Early 2003, I felt like my compositions were too determined by the square or rectangle format. I changed the shape of my drawings from square to a round, or circular format. Summer's Coming is drawn/painted on acid-free, 100% cotton, 90 lb. paper that I hand cut to 25 inches diameter.

Thanks,
:) M. F.

Uploaded

August 28th, 2016