Product Description:

15"x15" acrylic painting on hand stretched and primed canvas, varnished, December 2021-February 2022

I am happy to consult the purchaser on frame options!

Notes on the Piece: 

Every aspect of California Flea Market is intended to portray a captivating sense of calm that brightens up a room with nostalgic blues and yellows that loosely resemble the style of a Norman Rockwell illustration. While your eyes will find plenty of metal textures, graphic text, and crisp shadows to land on, your brain will probably only recognize the rusted spoon. Anybody looking at the rest of the tools will probably realize that the “scissors” aren’t quite scissors, the “hose handle” isn’t quite a hose handle, and the logo on the gold tray is almost entirely unreadable.

The subject matter itself is based on a very real photo I took of a flea market table on a sunny day in California, while visiting my friend in January, 2018. Although I have no idea what most of the objects are, I still feel like the placement of them seems orderly and absurd. It gives the viewer opportunity to get pleasantly lost as though it were an abstract composition of depth, shapes, and color. 

On a personal note, this piece is very homey and I can’t wait to decorate my home with it. I usually love painting in my studio but, for whatever reason, I dragged my easel out of there and painted a majority of this piece in the center of my bedroom, surrounded by all of my plants and yellow furniture. Although the sketch and underpainting only took about two days, the actual painting part took about a month of daily work to complete—mostly because of the bizarre textures that drew me to the photo in the first place. It feels symbolic to me because both the photo and the painting were produced in January, four years apart. It’s hard to believe how much I’ve changed between then and now, but I really cherish the aspects of myself and my friendships that have stayed the same.