False Start

from the History of Rock & Roll

20" x 30"

acrylic  and rhinestones on canvas

2010

Exhibitions

Bering Art Collective, Houston, Texas, The History of Rock & Roll, October 9 - 30, 2010

For a smaller canvas, this work is packed with a lot of meaning.  In 1994, the world was stunned by the suicide of Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana.  Three years since the release of their album Nevermind, the landscape of rock & roll had changed dramatically.  Suddenly the world was hearing an array of angst filled voices from the Pacific Northwest.  It was a new sound that challenged the pop heavy music that had dominated the charts for a decade. Rock and roll had become safe.  Pop was radio friendly.  Now there was a voice to a growing discontent.  The angst of a youth population who were being told that their generation would be the first in a century who would not be as successful as their parents. Grunge music was angry.  It was filled with fear and the self-doubt that embodied Generation X.  Now that generation had a voice.  Not since the angry voices of the 60's had music united a generation in such a way. With the suicide of Cobain, the grunge movement ended.  Other bands in the genre softened their sound or disappeared altogether. False Start is a chaotic, vibrant work that memorializes this moment.  Not only the death of a talented young man, but the death of an idea.  At the left of the canvas, the muse of tragedy, Melpomene,  looks upon a dynamic formation that cannot balance or completely form. An endless, spiraling maelstrom without definition. At the lower left is the last image the world would see of Kurt Cobain, his tennis shoe clad foot and hand laying half obscured on the floor of his Seattle home.