CONFES[SI]O[NS] OF A KING

Mixed medium and media on 24" x 20" canvas

• Graffiti markers and mops
• Spray paint
• Illustrations done with sharpie, pens, felt tip pens, and watercolor, sealed with archival spray
• oil paint sticks
• oil pastels
• gel medium
• Glow-in-the-dark pigment powders
• Unicorn blood
• Burned playing cards
• Acrylic markers

Finished in 2021, 'Confes[SI]o[NS] of a King' is the oldest of my paintings, having been a staple on the walls of Olde Towne Coffee and OTBX Downtown in Huntsville, AL.

It's the last piece I signed with my actual name before I embraced the title of yumedyne entirely.

It's one of the few pieces where I incorporated words in the front-paging piece rather than just the hidden back pieces. I wanted to capture the sense of paranoiac dread I felt living in America, drawing from the alphabet-soup organizational acronyms in 'Typewrite Lesson' by Cornelius, the hubris of the titular Doctor Frankenstein in Mary Shelly's novel, the inseparable nature of war and America detailed in Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian', pontifications on the violent nature of humanity in 'I Feel Better' by Hot Chip, the ominous hidden machines and indifference to the chaos they bring in 'Pull Up the Roots' and 'Girlfriend is Better' by Talking Heads, the feeling it'll never truly end embodied in 'Hey Orpheus (It's Never Over)' by Arcade Fire, and the corruptive nature of power in 'Slumlord' by Neon Indian.

It encapsulates feelings I still hold about American identity, our ties to wars across the globe, our complicity in genocide in places too far away for us to consider those being killed as "one of us". And now as I did then, I worry that, instead of changing the system, the system is changing me.