Everybody Wants Some

Thanks for showing up — or stumbling into Working Title, my collision of Old Masters and 1970s suburbia at Philly’s Da Vinci Art Alliance this September. The project started with four paintings I checked in Europe — one each from Madrid, Amsterdam, Florence, and Paris. Instead of reenacting them, I re-staged them through the pile of shag carpeting, framed by wood paneling. Myths rerouted through pop culture detritus, served with processed food. Each one feels unfinished, unresolved — ergo, “working titles.” It’s a kind of temporal skipping — from myth to Renaissance to suburbia to now.

This post is the first of four — one for each painting in the show — starting with the wan swagger of Tiger Blood.

TIGER’S BLOOD. 2025. egg tempera on panel. 11 × 14 inches.

This one comes out of Caravaggio’s Bacchus in the Uffizi — the adolescent wine god holding out a goblet, smirk already sour. Caravaggio paints him as both temptation and warning, indulgence laced with decay. I pulled him forward into the 1970s and he shapeshifted: not a mythic boy anymore, but Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. Older, grinning, stuck, replete with pornstache. The guy who doesn’t leave the party because the party is all he’s got. That’s the jump — Bacchus to Wooderson, myth to suburbia.

Here, Bacchus isn’t framed by grapes and vineyard fruit; he’s sharing a TV dinner and a wobbling gelatin mold. The abundant feast has become pre-fabbed, half-assed convenience on a side table — bright, artificial, full of the promise of an untasted frozen Salisbury steak and the suspended regret of a grape in Jell-O. With a glass of gasoline, neat, in raised hand, I’m not sure if he’s celebrating the moment or enduring it. Toast or anesthesia? Swagger or survival?

Like the vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, Tiger Blood is laced with memento mori — reminders of mortality hiding inside the feast. Caravaggio’s ripe fruit already hinted at rot; here, the Baroque feast is abundant, but the house-party spread is paper-thin and vaguely repellent. It’s the Jell-O melting and Swanson Dinner sweating under a mid-century bullet lamp. Pleasure is short-lived, the party always tips into decay. Tiger Blood is Charlie Sheen, mid-meltdown, declaring himself untouchable. Empty swagger as self-mythology.

Caravaggio, Bacchus, c. 1596. Oil on canvas. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

The figure hangs in a cultural limbo: caught between the watchful eye of The King of his recent past, and his immediate present of Everybody Wants Some. He’s got Velvet Elvis on the wall and Van Halen on the radio. Tiger Blood sits right in that fault line: swagger tipping into burnout, myth tipping into parody. A suburban vanitas, reminding us that every smirk hides rot, every drink is a countdown, and every myth is a well-worn posted footpath.

That’s the tension I wanted — comedy and tragedy fused. The smirk reads as confidence, but it’s really fragility. This isn’t Bacchus offering transcendence; it’s America staring itself down in the mirror, grinning while the hangover creeps in.

That sense of temporal skipping runs through the whole show: myth to Renaissance to 1970s suburbia to now. Each leap collapses centuries into inches, making the long past visible through the lens of the near past. And the things that land squarely in the present — a smartphone, a box of Fruity Pebbles, new technology and enduring brands — serve as orienting markers in the swirl, anchors in the timewarp.

Preorder prints are available now — hand-signed, limited edition, numbered. Come see it in the show, or line one up for your wall. Sometimes the best way to face the joke is to hang it where you can’t ignore it.