2013 • 58.5″ x 42″
acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets

The basic idea for this painting came from my Dad’s old quote about the nonsense people put up on television to distract us, “They’re just trying to sell soap.”

I wanted though to combine an individual’s state of mind with the reality of of the situation that I do in many of my works. When we consume the “news” we are giving ourselves over to “guilty diversions” but what they’re doing is offering up entertainment as a vehicle for the ad impressions upon which the business model is built.

The metaphors aren’t too tricky. I made this for a group show themed on our news media. This piece is a little bit more of an editorial cartoon than I usually do.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Posted by WOODCOCK

After a long exile in South Texas climbing out of a nihilistic funk, Otis Woodcock has found his way back to the open skies and quiet horizons of the American prairie. Having earned an MFA from Miami University, Ohio, he left his ancestral home in southern Indiana, spending the last three decades between Louisville, Kentucky, and San Antonio, Texas, developing his Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ practice. On this journey, an anxious recovering Catholic and cancer survivor gradually evolved into the optimistic existentialist whose work is less interested in providing answers than in questioning certainty. Today, Woodcock lives and works where the seasonal rhythms and expansive landscapes of the Midwest serve as the backdrop for an ongoing exploration of belief systems, cultural inheritance, and the subtle poetry of ordinary things.

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