The Machine

Machine

The Machine
43”H x 56”W
Mixed Media on Canvas

When I was about half way through the process of creating “Vietnam Elegy” (2013) I realized that the piece was taking on an unexpected significance and that I was going to need some help in promoting and marketing it. I did a quick, local internet search, came up with a company called Maverick Web Marketing. I met, interviewed and hired them…and the rest is history…and my remarkable connection with Maverick is still firmly in place.

Late in 2016, Maverick approached me, asking if I would be willing to take on an artistic challenge: to take the graphic images below, and interpret and translate their meaning (as I saw it) on canvas. I bit…and my painterly version of “Machine” is the result.

As background, Maverick’s mission is to help businesses build successes on the web. One facet of any enterprise’s activity today involves the productive use of email. Maverick has adopted a business model designed by Digital Marketer that teaches clients to make email activity more prolific and greatly improve their chances to make a sale…$$$. The first two graphics below touch on Digital Marketer’s (1) premise and (2) design. When contemplating how I was going to pursue this as an image on canvas, I felt that a horizontal format would work best. Since DM’s graphic was vertical (up & down), I asked Maverick to transpose the (2) design…flip things around and reposition the various steps so the end result could still be achieved…not top to bottom, but left to right. In the end, (3) graphic became the model of an email’s circumnavigation that would provide the structure for my artistic decoding of this business model.

Along the fourteen (14) month journey of producing my interpretation of “The Machine”, I photo-documented each step so as to provide a way to tell “the story behind the painting”…just as I had done for “Vietnam Elegy”. Perhaps in future installments, I might provide short, sequential explanations of how each segment came together as I share this visual travelogue.

 
 
–Denham Clements