The New Pop Art

Researching for this weekly pop culture column often takes me to the dark and dusty corners of the Internet in search of interesting morsels for your perusal, items that are either beginning to generate a buzz or possess that potential. Oftentimes I find myself off the beaten path, distracted by luring link after luring link, only to look around and find myself lurking in the murky shadows of the web’s shady underbelly.

And now I have stumbled across a new blog that you need to know about. I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever read about it in the Saturday Evening Post or even Rolling Stone. Yet it is a wonderful virtual crossroads where art, celebrity gossip and humor converge.

The website, Gallery Of The Absurd, features the art of a female artist who goes by the moniker “14” and captures the gossipy spirit of tabloid trash in beautifully rendered drawings and paintings. Whether she is besmirching Britney or terrorizing Tara Reid (and her bottle of the week), 14 finds her inspiration in the celeb-scandal rags of the checkout lane. In a recent interview with dvagallery.com, 14 said that she is influenced by “retro and modern pop culture, mythology, celebrity gossip, anthropology, vintage Mad Magazines, laughter and fairy tales.”

Hailing from Atlanta and working out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, 14 has caught the eye of many from across the country and around the globe. Now fans eagerly check her blog daily for the latest piece of what could only be called “pop art,” and with 14 cranking out five or ten per month, the wait is never too long.

14 has even received coverage in Newsday, which called her drawings “illustrations that parody celebrity culture with all the subtlety of a mouthful of red hots.” The New York Post wrote that 14’s work is “hitting the marrow of what is specifically annoying about specific celebrities.” And that she does.

Some of her favorite targets, er, subjects include the Olson Twins, Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, and the aforementioned Britney Spears and Tara Reid. She often depicts the Olson Twins as monkeys; Paris Hilton is drawn with enormous feet; Tom Cruise almost always has devil horns and is surrounded by imagery of Xenu, the alien icon of Scientology.

14 insists that, while they may appear as such, her paintings are not portraits. On the website she notes, “I am not painting their portraits…I paint only the gossip, buzz, chatter and brand image the particular celebrity projects or attracts. I seek to capture a peculiar segment of modern pop-culture mythology as it unfolds before our eyes.”

It is an interesting concept: capturing on canvas the idea of gossip, the essence of rumor, with the celebrities and young Hollywood serving only as a vehicle for it. The spirit that she is attempting to paint is the very same one that tabloids attempt to bottle and sell. You don’t generally buy the tabloid for a particular story, you buy it because you revel in the gossip.

See what I mean. Check out 14’s work at http://galleryoftheabsurd.typepad.com.

-From Pulse
February 23, 2006