“American Dream #1”
acrylic latex, pencil, photocopies on sailcloth
50” x 36”
June 1998

 

On one Sunday morning in the late 1990s I ran across the street to the liquor store to buy a copy of the Sunday Los Angeles Times – the big paper stuffed with ads and an extra large classified section. This was before the days when reading the news everyday on the internet was a common thing, and the Sunday paper was really something.

On this particular Sunday I perused the classifieds, looking at the real estate ads with small pictures of the houses. This one that said “Attention Large Families!” caught my eye and I cut out the ad and a handful of other ads with photos I used to make collages that Sunday afternoon.

The next week I enlarged the house ad on a photocopier, and attached it the canvas. After painting on top of the photocopies in a sparse fashion – my new series, The American Dream Series, began and this piece was titled “American Dream #1.”

We still have this piece.