I Got Ants in My Pants
2015 | Acrylic and varnish on canvas | 3 panels each 84” x 64”
I'm So Fancy
2015 | Acrylic and varnish on canvas | 2 panels each 84” x 64”
Turn Down For What
2015 | Acrylic and varnish on canvas | 2 panels each 84” x 64”
ARTIST STATEMENT
Ive Got Ants In My Pants
BY TOM EVERHART
“I’ve Got Ants In My Pants (and I Need To Dance)” is a new body of 57 works on MDF Board, Paper, and Canvas, along with new mixed media print works. It is an exhibition of camouflaged visual confessions of the inspirational motivations that push the restless necessity for creative thinking.
It’s as if James Brown was screaming his lyrics “I Got Ants In My Pants and I Need To Dance”, soon after day one of my inspirational 20 year relationship with my friend Charles M. Schulz. Although in my mind, instead of “I Need To Dance”, I was hearing, “I need to make new art”.
Nine years of this inspiration later after we first met in 1980, I was given a maximum of two years to live. With ants still very much in my pants, I knew I needed to immediately make this new art before it was too late. Furthermore, It was very important that the work had to be about being alive.
Today, twenty-six years later, the work is still concerned with the rhythms of living within us and in the world all around us. I have been especially focused on the restless rhythms that motivate and inspire art to be made. Since I seem to be surrounded by an abundance of professional and should be professional dancers, the most accessible vehicle for its visual expression was dance and related subjects.
I spend much time in the two studios in Venice Beach and French Polynesia. My most influential restless rhythms come from the liquid rhythms of water and the differences in the rhythms of these two waters. This exhibition could have easily been titled “Watermarks”. Only a fluid black line drawing, that starts each work, creates a mark made by hand with a brush. All of the color application is a very fluid paint poured onto the flat surface, and then tilted to direct the rhythm of its water quality according to my own artistic needs.
The restless rhythm of light found in both studio locations is as well an immediate influence within the rhythms of my living. In this body of work, these rhythms are expressed in the moving light forms of spotlights, moonlight, daylight and nightlight.
Around the same time that I met Charles Schulz, in 1980, I was introduced to the study of semiotics. For myself and many of my friends, this analysis of language, which we applied to the image, inspired us to cut out pieces of various sources and re arrange them together to create a new narrative.
Twenty-six years later, as well, this formula continues to create this new body of work. Bits and pieces of music and related subjects combined with bits and pieces of visual influence from my 20 year relationship with Charles Schulz, aim to create a new narrative.
Through this new narrative, this body of work , of restless living rhythms, hopes to suggest that something fascinating, new, beautiful, or even something incredibly stupid, could be the ants in the pants that motivates and demands creative thinking.