The remnants of an interrupted Scrabble game…
Wednesday 14 May 2008Here is a piece I’ve been working on for an upcoming show. I think the title is going to be:
The Remnants of an Interrupted Scrabble Game Which at 20 Feet Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Harmon and Dali)
The idea for this piece came from looking at a painting by Salvador Dali after I had been playing with a scrabble game and trying to make pictures out of the pieces.
Here is the Dali painting:
Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko)
Oil on Canvas, 1976
After this piece was posted on the MAKE: blog I decided to change it to look more like the original image by Leon Harmon on which the composition of Dali’s painting was based. I also changed it so that the final image would fit better with the rules of scrabble.
Here is what Harmon’s original image looks like:
I was careful when I was working on this piece that all the words fit together following the official scrabble rules and consulting the official tournament rules for acceptable 2 and 3-letter words. So, hypothetically, my piece is evidence that a scrabble game could at some point end up looking exactly like a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. And in a 3-D world where Jesus continues to show up on potato chips and the Vatican is looking for proof of alien existence I find the possibilities of the things that might actually happen much more surreal than anything anyone can imagine…