Messy Mya Painting, And Apology

Larger image.

Much larger print image.

I've removed my former painting of Messy Mya, the one based uoon his death photo, and replaced it with the freshly painted image above.

When I first came across the now infamous photo of Anthony Barre, down on the sidewalk with camera phones in his face, I  immediately related. Lately I've been feeling like a victim of my own online presence so the photo had a meaning to me.  That's why I wrote my name in his blood; I was saying  'I feel like Messy Mya shot down'-trying to entertain and still things go wrong.

I've never run an auction outside of Ebay and directly on this blog before, so I thought if I posted it here with no rules and no conditions that people would 'get' that the auction was meant as a challenge.  I didn't feel the need to spell that part out; I assumed people could figure it out on their own.  Just like Mya made videos and then people took videos of him at his last moment, I was picturing 'myself' in Mya's place and then sarcastically asking 'how many pieces of gold for what I do?'  Basically I was just feeling sorry for myself.  I never really expected to sell the painting and didn't anticipate it would explode like it did on Twitter, or that trashy aggregate sites selling iphones or vacation packages would grab the link to my painting and stick it out there as the first result for 'messy mya death photo' as many did.  Just for the record-I never Twittered the original; I just posted it on my blog and decided that people could either find it or not.

I think that, when you are an artist, like Mya was an artist, you sometimes decide to do a thing solely on inspiration and to get in people's faces and convince yourself not to care what anyone thinks or feels, because if get too sensitive you miss making an important point.  Or so you think.

Reading the comments I saw there were only thirty or so people who were upset, just a fraction of the people who were visiting because of the painting.  I could see they were good people and I was waiting every day for them to 'get it' but it wasn't happening.

So, the auction is over.  I won't sell the original painting to anyone.  I end up selling almost everything I do-but I'll keep that one. I've pulled that image from the internet and replaced it with the portrait of Mya above, which was the happiest and most lively image of him I could find.  The original of this newer painting is also not for sale, but fans may feel free to use the posted image of it in any non-commercial way they might like.

To those good people who were upset by my original painting, I truly apologize.  Sometimes I really am a so-and-so, but I usually try to aim that only at other so-and-so's or myself.