Pilgrimage to Supercuts by Dave Waite
Dave Waite’s painting “Pilgrimage to Supercuts” is featured in the 2015 volume of the University of Colorado Honors Journal.
Artist’s statement:
Every day, we encounter innumerable details that we likely disregard. The quiet smell of a woman sitting next to you, the cashier who you never bother to make eye-contact with, the hundred tiny movements of a hand as it grabs a glass or scratches an itch. Sometimes we lose these details because we do not understand them, or see relevance in them, or more likely, we just don’t notice them.
Oil painting is one of the most fundamental and powerful ways to capture those subtleties and nuances, compact them into a space and build something out of them. In my piece, “Pilgrimage to Supercuts,” I focus on the “little people” who are, too often, the neglected details of our day to day. The impact of the subtleties of the painting – the brush strokes, the thick layers of color – compact and interact with each other to create a face, just as the “little people” compact and interact to create the foundations of community.
The figure in the painting is a man who travels around the world and devotes his life to sharing his stories to other people. He guides other transients through those stories, these collections of details so that they may find relevance in their own details. I intended for the subject to match the real person as closely as possible; however, through the knack of accident, many viewers see another familiar face in his. There’s a reason why I spent 30 hours painting a face that no one looks at.
See this work and more at http://www.colorado.edu/honorsjournal/archives/2015/art-2015#_title3.
Find out about submitting your work or applying to join the Honors Journal Editorial Board at honorsjournal.com.
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