Messy Mixture of Realities

Note. This art project has not yet started. It is just an idea, so far. The inspiration was originally triggered by the large “Carnival” collage of paintings by Ernie+Bidet (1985). When Case was a theoretical physics student, back in the 1980s, he lived in a student dorm in downtown Amsterdam, amidst and fascinated by lots of artists, such as Hans Frisch, who taught (nationally famous) Dutch singer/artist Herman Brood how to make street art. And Ernst Voss (Ernie) lived one floor below Case, with his German shepherd in the basement of the dorm.

With my art I try to express the messy mixture of

• our daily reality
• our self-created realities
• a new, dawning reality.

It is the mixture of

• what we do
• our deepest needs and desires
• the brutal facts of the rapidly changing world around us.

There are few events or experiences that express this messiness better than carnival: legitimately, for a few days, we can be someone else, the person we had always hoped to be, the person we are secretly scared of, or just, a crazy person. There is no more beautiful mixture of self-created realities, possibly mixed with the dawning reality, in the reality of those few days.

The artworks of the Carnival art project should express this messy mixture by using mixed media techniques, such as acrylic, pastel and oil paint, markers and spray, combining different color palettes, graphic and painting styles, abstract and realistic elements, different scales and more, into a varied yet consistent whole – creating artworks with the combined identifiable tension and identifiable feeling of comfort, that I call “Warm Grounding“.