CD Cover

When I get tired of stealing from myself, I steal from other people - preferably dead, famous ones. That way it's not called plagiarism, it's called an "homage." Copy Mickey Mouse or some unknown painter down the street and you get hit with a zillion dollar lawsuit. Copy Gainsborough or Matisse and everybody ooh's and aah's about how creative you are. Go figure.

These pictures were done for a CD album cover (the photographic versions, not the paintings, dummy!) Legend has it that the Blue Boy and Pinkie were always in love, because their pictures stood side by side for so many years – never mind that they were painted twenty-four years apart by different painters. To play with that idea, we had lightning strike both frames, allowing both Blue Boy and Pinkie to break out of the prisons that had held them apart; the final picture was the two of them holding each other, together at last.

Nice idea, until you start trying to combine a painting and a photograph.Getting Blue Boy and Pinkie costumes wasn't difficult in Hollywood; the tricky part was getting the photographs to look enough like paintings so we could blend the two together.

Also, bench presses weren't really popular in the eighteeenth century, so the original Blue Boy has the chest and shoulders of a scarecrow; we had to stretch it considerably to match the buff rock star who was taking over his persona.



Blue Boy is mostly the original body, stretched and distorted; his head and right arm have been replaced, and most of the background is invented. Oh yeah, what passed for blue in 1770 doesn't cut it in the 21st century; we pumped that up a bit as well. Tasteless and garish, you say? Gee, I certainly hope so...





Pinkie is the original painting from the waist down; from the waist up it's a model and rented costume, except for most of the bonnet and the tassels. The background is the original, only cloned and stretched; we got the frame out of a junk shop and broke it to pieces in Photoshop.





I think the lightning bolt was from New Mexico; if it wasn't, it should have been. Never saw more lightning in my life than in NM...