Gucci Slide is an abstract, acrylic painting I completed in July 2022. This is the first piece where I tried to utilize colors from a culturally recognizable brand, as most of my work is non-brand specific. Being an international luxury brand, I really wanted to do it justice by utilizing genuine 23 karat gold and use Gucci’s immediately recognizable color scheme.

The top half of the painting consists of a large, sweeping cascade of concentric, paint puddles pushed from a 10” wide dustpan. The result is achieved by moving the dustpan in a variety of accelerating speeds, pressures, and lifting, in a single moment of focused effort that took a total of just 7 seconds. The bottom half of the piece was painted via hand/brush with the goal of expanding the widening cascade and having the Gucci ribbon disconnect from the cascade in full view. This took a total of 50 hours of total planning/execution to complete, line by line.

I think it’s extremely important to emphasize the unique benefits that physical art like painting, sculpture, graffiti, etc. have over digitally created art. For example, I’ve yet to see a computer program that enables you to accurately represent a paint splash with perfect compositional awareness. Without quantum computing, it’s impossible to accurately model the interplay between Earth’s physics like gravity, temperature, paint densities, utensil contact shape and strike speeds. Since computer programs do a great job at creating perfect straight lines and smooth gradients, I try to paint perfect lines in contrast with organic paint movements to highlight the stark contrast between our digital and physical world.