Shoot. I had a lot of names for this one but I finally settled on Shoot. This was a concept driven piece. I mean I had the idea and then tried to figure out how to execute that idea. In my head there had been one or two adults sitting in easy chairs watching TV and drinking beer. They would have been seen from behind with the TV in the distance with images of war on it. In the foreground, boys would have been playing with guns. I could never figure that out to my satisfaction but after using the stars and stripes in Collateral Damage, I thought of using them in Shoot as well. I dispensed with the easy chairs and the grown ups and emphasized the TV. The images of the boys came from a series of books that I have, each one featuring photos from one decade of the twentieth century. These were from the fifties. It is surprising in our culture how many pictures there are of kids with guns. These two were playing with guns, but in a lot of the images the kids are using real guns, fighting in real wars. This painting is slanted, I guess, toward a middle class American point of view, but I hope it implies those kids in the real wars and also the commonplaceness of brutality "as seen on TV" and also how it is romanticized in our culture.
