Finders Keepers

Lot Note:

Ed Flood

This emblematic sketch by Chicago Imagist artist Ed Flood (1944-1985) of his typical motifs of palm trees and flatly rendered imagery drawn from advertisements and popular media offers insight on his art-making process, as it would have likely been used as a template for one of his signature reverse paintings on Plexiglas.  

Flood championed the use of Plexiglas for the smooth, machine-like quality that it bestowed in the finished work. It also allowed for the effect of three-dimensionality without sacrificing a flat plane. To create this three-dimensionality, Flood was able to utilize his skills in woodworking and other traditional crafts—then undervalued in the art scene—to build these boxes. To use this sort of template for such a box, Flood would have traced the graphite on vellum construction on the back of the Plexiglas sheet and then filled in the colors related to the painting—corresponding in part to the different collaged layers in the sketch— in reverse order so that, when viewed from the front, an entirely flat picture emerges in its proper orientation.  

The reverse painting technique was appropriated by Flood and other Imagists from sign painters who painted logos and advertisements on store windows, emphasizing techniques and subject matter that had likewise been overlooked or else viewed as too common for use in “high art.” This unpretentious adoption of popular culture in Sketch for Enemy Gunners (Sloe-Eyed Blonde) in both technique and subject matter—of snappy comic strip speech and masked heroines—results in a work that is both an interesting insight on Flood’s working method as well as an electric composition in its own right.