Hello It’s Me.
I am Derek Ayres and welcome to my inaugural blog post. Welcome, and feel free to take a look around the place, I cleaned it up for you. I figure your time is semi-precious, so let's jump right in.
At the moment I am prepping for my first exhibition after a long hiatus. I have switched it up, again. Having gone through recovery and then the lockdown, I was gratitude-journaling and posting small drawings on Instagram for about a year or so. As a Guy-with-a-Guitar™, this lead to finding an enduring muse in drawing my beloved vintage guitar amplifiers. But what to do with all that white background? I remembered watching the documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and catching a flash of "The Banality of the Banality of Evil" where Banksy inserted into a thrift store painting a Nazi officer sitting on a wooden bench, taking in a bucolic lake and mountain view. So wildly out-of-place, what an opaque bewildering narrative, both the scene itself and whatever is going on in his head...
So of course as a trained sculptor, it only makes sense that this year I've started making my own fake plein air watercolors, following along instructional YouTube videos, playing a game with a rotating cast of amps. Sometimes I make up stories or general impressions, layering emotional metaphors, or interpersonal signifiers, triggering title puns from films or music; other times the amps are simply just in a place. For the most part, the amps stay the same, save for varying color schemes, but the environments change. It reminds me of both the Rothko color fields and the Forrest Gump historical cameos for some reason.
As with all things DIY in my life, I offer a couple of paragraphs written by my friend and insta-art critic, Robert Fanelli:
THE TOOLS REMAIN
Derek Ayres' new watercolors have something to do with the concept of "personal archeology" and a feeling of his mortality, or at least the mortality of his own culture. Parallel to the gods of ancient Greece or Rome, the gods of his 13-year-old self walked the earth: Jimmy Page, Ace Frehley, Angus Young. And just like the ancient gods, only a few artifacts remain. Often only the tools that created the statues and the artworks that survive. The chisel and palette outlast the woodcut and watercolor. And so, the sturdy amplifiers, the solid body guitars, at this point, may outlive the music itself. These are the bygone symbols — the crumbling Parthenon, the half-buried statue, the found spear tip — that will have future generations collecting and valuing, and pondering their meaning and significance. Perhaps entirely divorced from the music, which may cease to exist in any usable form after repeated technological paradigm shifts. But these are not tributes to the gods, these are the tools of the gods themselves. The art and the gods are gone. But the tools remain.
These paintings are the equivalent of finding a feather from Shakespeare's pen, or an obscure piece of Kepler's telescope at a construction site and thinking that at one time, people worshipped birds and pieces of polished glass were buried with royalty. The meaning is lost, but the gods live on, separated from their true meaning, and perpetuated through history with misunderstood symbols.
-- ROBERT FANELLI, July 2021
MISS SCARLET. watercolor, gouache, & ink, 8”x10”, 2021
That brings me to my latest watercolor, "Miss Scarlet." Maybe from the board game/movie classic "Clue", a boilerplate femme fatale using her charms to her advantage. Perhaps she could be Scarlett O'Hara from "Gone with the Wind". Petty, manipulative, fairly narcissistic, yet pretty and likable sometimes. Reined in at the end though, abandoned and trapped. Or just a young woman fenced in and pushing to get out. Either way, she never wore an “A” and her color isn't really scarlet, eh?
The plan is to do 20 of these bad boys and girls and exhibit them at this year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Deets and links to images under Plein Air Guitar are on my home page. Maybe come take a look in person and say, "Hello, it's me."