The contest:
I am in great need of some serious art-speak, so I am appealing for your help
to put something together! I need a general description or analysis or mission
statement for my art show and promotional materials! These critiques of me as
an artist or analysis of my art can be positive, negative, funny, serious, whatever!
I'll try them all on like so many hats to see what works best for my purposes!
The winner of this art-speak competition will be awarded the genuine Eddie Breen
painting shown below. Four runners-up will get Eddie T-Shirts. All entries,
however, winners or not, may be utilized for promotional purposes. Credentials
are better for this contest - If you're the curator of New York's Museum of
Modern Art for example, you may have an edge. But not necessarily! If you can
analyze my art in a clever way you can make up for any lack of credentials,
especially if you are the janitor at the Museum of Modern Art. That would be
even better! So define me! Please!
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I decided on a winner!
Robert, below, gave me something usable in
"Eddie's talent explodes our conservative "cone of vision" and splatters it out onto the frame of the work itself. Art concepts such as proportion, space, perspective, tone and composition are replaced by an unrelenting, unflinching vision, the power of one man's incredible imagination: multiethnic heads, bowling skulls, mousehead ants, the angel police, the quilt beast, mouthless Maureen. Eddie explains: "art can neither be good or bad, only interesting or boring." Eddie is never boring. His art is engaging, thought provoking, righteous, witty, wicked, and singularly unique.
I also liked Kathy's string a sentence system, which would have probably won first place, but required effort of a minimal sort.
Kat's description was pretty good, but as I am currently really only on Ebay, her pronouncement that I was "consistently in galleries and exhibitions in prominent art centers" was a lie I wish were true, and no doubt will be true in the future!
Basically, I gave Kathy, Kat, Michael and CatBoy the runner up prizes because they wrote the longest bios, and they should win a stinking T-Shirt for that!
These are all entries of the breen bio contest.
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From Paula:
Mr. Breen's work touches upon the omnipresence of God, reminding us that God is to be found everywhere, even in the mundane.
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From Kat:
Eddie Breen,a highly regarded fine artist with a strong social conscience, stands prominent at the forefront of makers of symbolic art. His inborn talent for visual description transcends the ordinary and the tasteful; this quality has brought his work to the attention of the Papal press. His visual bombshells depicting the contemporary human condition cannot be ignored, nor can the critics disparage his work for it is capably done. His use of discarded art is ingenious. Eddies color palette, well lets say he not scared to use all the colors in the box. Mr. Breen has an extensive following of those who admire his purpose and appreciate his boldness and humor. His art is consistently in galleries and exhibitions in prominent art centers and on e-bay; many aficionados have it in their collections. Mr. Breen is a self educated painter.
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From Robert:
Bommy, bad breeny bottle, botulism!" "Could I please have a cup of plague." You've just entered a world where "mutant Nuns spear fish with their tongues," the right and righteous world of the artist, Eddie Breen. Not since Basquiat has there been an artist that has so quickly captured the imagination of the entire (wired) art world. Not since "God had a yard sale," not since Jesus discovered Mary reading the "love letters of Satan" has there been someone who can enable the cauliflowered cat loving, sex obsessed, chock-o-nuts, blister beetle, beleaguered blind among us to see as does the artist, Eddie Breen. Eddie deftly performs a colonoscopy of our secular souls. Okay, well, sometimes just a sigmoidoscopy. Eddie is the original incredible flaming power showerhead. Great for homes with low pressure--less septic waste. An artist who simply defies mullet classification. Eddie Breen. Eddie is NOT the kind of artist who would play sports as a skin wearing a flesh colored tank top with twist on nipples. But he can and would paint "Jesus knocks the clownhead out of the park." He has no brilliant brother to fix things. But he has painted "alien children baptized in molten lava." "Jesus absorbed by crushing debt." Like a glowing growing political boil, Eddie with standard brushes ablaze has tattooed a set of smoldering, tasking, tingling scars around the navel ringed lexicon of art. Images that include: Flaming bass. Flame people. Flame dogs. Flame cats. Flaming Beefeaters. Flame owls. Flame couples. Flame pirates. Flaming phoenix. Devil bees. Crab lady. Crossman. Crucifixion flow. Holy teeth. Demonhead bouquets. Mudgirls. Drug addicted angel fish. Circus priests. Cave fish. Mating plumage. Debt eel. Christian aliens. Wormheads. Termite fish. Exploding clownheads. Helen with a skunk-stripe. Holy goat. Batman. This incredibly diverse tableaux, a biblical flood in and of itself, has wedged its "bony rhinohead" into the mainstream of art and art collectors not unlike the spiritually inspired, apocalyptic art of black folk artists, or Philip Guston's late work with its cast of characters he used to enact his (Guston's) monstrously comic apocalyptic fantasies. Eddie's talent explodes our conservative "cone of vision" and splatters it out onto the frame of the work itself. Art concepts such as proportion, space, perspective, tone and composition are replaced by an unrelenting, unflinching vision, the power of one man's incredible imagination: multiethnic heads, bowling skulls, mousehead ants, the angel police, the quilt beast, mouthless Maureen. Eddie explains: "art can neither be good or bad, only interesting or boring." Eddie is never boring. His art is engaging, thought provoking, righteous, witty, wicked, and singularly unique. If you dream of cattle you just may be an alien. That being said no one has to explain to you the art of Eddie Breen. If you believe the earth is a self-organizing, living system that has been consistently managed for over 4 billion years by a large group of bacteria led by Strom Thurmond: well . . . best of luck to you with all that. When he's not painting, or watching allot of teevee, or spending quality time with his wonderful wife and wanting son, Eddie can be found out at the golf course with a web cam on his "bone crown" with both ears intact holding a four iron in hand waiting patiently for the gopher from the movie Caddyshack to pop up. . . . just waiting to give the devil his due. Oh, yeah, you know what I mean.
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From Cathy:
My brother and I found this technique useful when attending art shows. Maybe it would also be useful in constructing an artist's statement. The original instructions are as follows: String-A-Sentence® Here's a list of words to insert in your conversation over the course of the evening. Using the chart, mix any adjective/adjective/noun combination to produce impressive sounding sentences. ADJECTIVE (1) Sumptuous Insipid Sensational Ethereal Traditional Empirical Sublime Myopic Child-like Smoky Glazed Haunting Heroic Multi-layered Spooky Obtuse Poignant ADJECTIVE (2) Bravura Rococo Pop-oriented Organic Iconoclastic Marxist Lyrical Angst-ridden Post-modernest Byzantine Rothko-esque Geometrical Visionary Sculptural Metaphysical countercultural Dali-esque NOUN (3) Brushwork Imagery Format Tension Ennui Construstion Bas Relief Synergy Composition Rendering Retrospective Thingness Theme Juxtaposition Microcosm Collage Metaphor Your work could be descibed as having a "haunting, iconoclastic synergy" to it, or perhaps the "child-like, metaphysical tension" holds the viewer's interest. You get the picture. I hope I win the painting. If so, I will share it with my brother, but I don't think his wife will let him keep it in the house.
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From Cat Boy: Sporting a priceless passion for collecting firewood in the dead of winter, the bonafide reincarnation of Madama Butterfly (and close, personal friend of the former Shirley Temple), aka Eddie Breen, makes his gallery debut December __-__ at the ____ Gallery in _________. A prominent feature on ebay for well nigh over a year now, Mr. Breen delights in teasing the fervent, misguided masses with his clever piggyback art. His keen, anti-Christian representations appeal to a wide range of aficionados, most notably the diehard dwellers of the art underworld. At least one customer calls him "Mr. Reliable," while others, most celebratory in their kudos rave, "To err is human, to Breen, divine." George W. refused to comment on the artist's works, merely mumbling, "They are talking about myself. Again. When Mr. Breen paints, he is speaking about myself. And, I am speaking about myself right now. Did you vote for me yet?" Mr. Breen, captured on web cam for this interview, eloquently responded, "Yakkity yak. More mars black." Be sure to visit Mr. Breen's web site at www.eddiebreen.com ***
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From Johnny:
This artists' cartoony schism on religious, electric catholic nun juicer....like the old bat chain puller spewing pricks finely honed to humiliate those holy door knockers, forbidden by the Pope in 50 states, the BAD BOY of Acrylic Rock, the Ambassador of questionable desires. The man goes deep beyond the marrow of thought, pulling smiles out of all ! A true celebration of a slam bam thank-you mam, art huckster!!
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From Michael:
THE DAY THAT ART DIED: THE EDDIE BREEN STORY We've all drawn mustaches on faces in magazines and newspapers but when Eddie Breen dons his gay apparel, no image is safe and the sacred becomes profane. Eddie is a double entity residing in the beer soaked suburbs north of Boston while simultaneously playing chicken on the information highway. He was conceived when Van Gogh met Monty Python and went at it like bunnies in the confessional box of a martian church. It wasn't until his forties that Eddie learned that those darned hippie chopsticks were actually something called "paint brushes". The world would never be the same. Too cheap to buy new canvases, Eddie wastes precious gas and bellows exaust into the fragile eco-system while scouring flea markets and yard sales to find the perfect paintings on which to spill the tainted fruit of his brain. The resulting "piggyback" art has become a style uniquely Breen. The muse he invokes opens a Pandora's box where aliens, hillbillies, Satan, Jesus, nuns and all sorts of mutants frolic in technicolor harmony upon the canvas. Into order to infect as much of the planet as possible with his rantings, the entity known as Eddie Breen began to spread his gospel in cyberspace using eBay as his soap box. As his fame and career grow like a plague of locusts, Mr. Breen leaps from the internet and across the bay into his first gallery showing in the Pilgrim's first landing place. The Pilgrims fled persecution, now Eddie brings it right back to us. If his paintings don't make you smile, then the prozac is working.
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From Michelle:
Not content to leave bad enough alone, Eddie Breen, has taken outsider art even farther outside the box. In this time of recycled chic, Eddie Breen has developed a cult following of "patrons" who simply can’t get enough of his "Breenishness". Starting with thrift store and garage sale finds, Eddie embellishes the original with devils, Jesus, nuns, and other assorted freakishness including his soon to be trademark popping out eyeball. To this he adds bits of his stream of consciousness, which can seem totally inspired or leave one’s ears ringing with that non-verbalized "huh?" and the fear of being found out that you’re the only one who doesn’t get it. Is it art? Some people seem to think so (myself included) and will spend frequent idle hours bidding for his paintings on E-Bay with a smug certainty that they have stumbled onto the next big thing. In the case of Eddie Breen one man’s trash has certainly become another man’s treasure. Just don’t wait to see it at Sotheby’s.
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From David:
See me. Hear me. Feel me. Bow down before me. I am the great and ominous Eddie Breen, this is my art, respect it, worship it, and, most importantly, BUY IT. Use your credit cards, your cashiers checks, your American greenbacks to jump on the fantastic, funny , fabulous art train that is Eddie Breen. The renaissance had Michelangelo, the impressionist Van Gogh, the cubist Picasso and now the WORLD has Eddie. Chant my name.Eddie.Eddie.Eddie.Eddie. Buy my art. Get Breened.
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From Linda:
Here is a go at it. Eddie Breen has become one of Americas great piggy back artist. He captures Jesus, Satan, Nuns, and other Christian figures, with color and power of the brush. Although he has never had any structured education in the Arts, he has mastered what it takes to get his messages across. His paintings have become very popular. He paints only "one of a kinds" which makes his paintings even more appreciative. "Insert biography here"---------------------
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