Bio:
Timothy Comeau is googleable.
Statement:
I grew up with guns. While in art school, a friend of mine once thought a fellow art student was so cool because he had a box of shells in his house, and I thought that must of made me supercool because I grew up with a basement full of guns. And if Michelangelo could get away with saying he imbued Carrera marble with his wet nurse's breastmilk, I could probably say the same about gunpowder, although I wasn't breastfed and my Dad wasn't a reloader or anything. The metaphor seems appropriate nonetheless, as my father at the time was a gunsmith and ran a gun shop out of the basement of our house. The gun industry is kindof sleazy but my father went against that current, and we grew up as responsible gun owners, with a real sense that it was wrong to use guns for anything but sportsmanship such as target shooting and hunting, and that playing cops and robbers that included pointing toy guns at people was wrong. It was lame but we got the message.
I'm not big on the Judas Priest, and 'All Guns Blazing' is just another wanker rock anthem for me. It's way too easy to illustrate this song (some guy with his neck straining, arms reached out with two Uzis, candle flames ejaculating from the muzzle). To me it is so 1980s and reminds me so much of the movie 'Falling Down' which I incorrectly remember as being from that decade rather than 1993 when it was actually released. An early sketch for my piece took 18th Century drawings of the siege of the Bastille, cannons blazing, while above an clipped-winged angel sat next to the headline of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I figured it was a commentary of some kind, but then realized my aesthetic obsession with the French Revolution threatened to turn me into a one trick pony.
A moment of clarity came and the dog is, well ... you see, with a song like this, it's too easy to do the violence thing, which isn't something I support. We've got guns blazing in Iraq and all over the world and that just seems obscene and derogatory. Our safe little city almost had an incident of blazing guns in recently, until a dog saved the day. So it seemed like a dog deserved to be painted. The rest - I mean, how you see the song in the image - is up to you.
