Ghost Snacks came to me as a title with no real meaning beyond the obvious: snacks that had died, and returned as ghosts. What the heck did that mean? What would it look like? And who cares?
Initially I was going to execute this idea as a quick-and-dirty canvas - an abstract background, some big glowing snack shapes, and call it good! A painting like that, I could finish in a day and then move on to another project (probably one that had more details behind it). But recently I had become interested in having my paintings for the library show tell a story, even if that story wasn’t completely obvious, or possessed of qualities like ‘clarity’. Even though I was about to start a painting called Ghost Snacks, I found myself asking a bunch of questions like: where would you find ghost snacks? Who would find them? Are they scary? How big are they and can they interact with their environment?
Suddenly my simple canvas became anything but simple. I decided to set the scene in a kitchen, but dimly lit to suggest that there were no people about. I populated it with mice, because they were logical characters to set in an empty kitchen, and small enough to be dwarfed and potentially frightened by snacks (even dead ones). And finally, I decided to dress my mice in ways that made you wonder just what on earth they were doing before they found these ghost snacks! There was definitely some sort of story taking place here, and maybe the audience could figure out what it was.
Connections:
Ghost Snacks features the second reference to Magnum, P.I. in the form of a mouse that looks exactly like Tom Selleck (previously referenced in MagThumb P.I. and later in Affordable Solutions to Unusual Problems). There’s also a mouse who seems to be some kind of sorceror, and in his little mousey paw he holds a magical staff that looks just like the one from the Morihar portrait!
