Let's meat on the street

I was out walking my dog, Jonah, in the neighborhood. We came to a corner and Jonah became very interested in something. It was meat.

In the grass between the sidewalk and the curb lay a package of beef, still in cellophane. It was there the next day. And the following day. I took a snapshot.

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One and Three Chairs By Joseph Kosuth

In this piece Josef Kosuth compares and contrasts the thing and representations or references to the thing. In this context they become interchangeable. Think about how the Mona Lisa really only exists (as far as you know) as pictures of a painting. At this point the pictures are the painting. In the case of Josef’s chair the picture of the picture of the chair has replaced the chair.

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One thing that’s interesting about painting digitally is that you can paint “on” anything. Import a photo and just paint on top of it. I thought that it would be fun to paint with real paint on a photo.

I returned to my photo of street meat. I arranged the photo three times to create a repeating pattern. I added a steak emoji for flavor. I printed this onto a 12” x 18” sheet of canvas then laminated this onto a stretched canvas.

I set up my paints and easel. Jonah joined me.

I take a lot of photographs of my cooking. I had several good reference photos, so I painted a New York Strip steak on top of the photo collage.


I like the tension between the all-too-real meat in a package on the grass, the silly steak emoji, and the ennobled painting of a steak.

While I painted Caroline kept me company, reading her medical journal. By the time I finished we both wanted steak.