This week in monumental art it is everyone’s favourite internet artist who is it that is right it is chris (simpsons artist) and his first ever unsettling picture that he posted on facebook of homer a character from the tv show called the simpsons.
I’m sure many of you will be familiar with Chris’s idiosyncratic drawings and accompanying ramblings in the style of the above. Crude, childish, and bordering on the outright hideous, when he uploaded this bizarre illustration onto social media in early 2011 he managed, incredibly, to change the art game forever.
The portrait is pretty disturbing, distorted but with none of the measured effect of caricature: an eye floats away from Homer’s face, his teeth are not delineated properly and there is an absolute disregard for any sense of proportion or perspective. Its caption – ‘DOG!’ – is short but sweet, the misspelling of Homer’s immortalised catchphrase complementing perfectly Chris (Simpsons Artist)’s strange deformation of this pop-culture icon. Close enough to be recognisable but hopelessly misshapen, Chris’s hamfisted drawings really do resemble the poor imitations of a child.
What’s most remarkable about this picture, especially as I sit here trying to write a serious analysis of it, is that the longer you look at it the funnier it gets. On first sight, Chris (Simpsons Artist)’s artwork confronts us with a pretty simple question: is this the talentless doodling of an innocent mind, or the parodic work of a comedic genius? Given the way his drawings have developed, becoming more studied and exaggerated, we can perhaps conlude the latter, and Chris (Simpson Artist)’s art instead becomes a comment on the condition of contemporary art in the internet age. Chris embraces that canted old criticism of modern art (yes, a child really could have drawn this), as well as social media’s role in providing a public platform for all art, the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s impossible to take Chris (Simpsons Artist) seriously, but that’s not to say that his work is not profound.
Chris (Simpsons Artist), whose real identity remains unknown, now has a huge following on Facebook, has had several pieces featured in the Independent, and in May 2012 his work was displayed at the IG:LU art gallery in Inverness. In this first picture that he ‘gone and done’, Chris (Simpsons Artist) challenged what it means to be an artist today – and what’s more, it looks like he did it on MS Paint.
