[ Posted: Oct 06, 2009 ]
About two and half years ago I participated in this book idea called "The Book of Conversations", where 120 artists were given a provocative question to address in whatever way we wanted. I was given the question "Do you ever have racist thoughts", which I struggled with for a bit, conceptually. Eventually I came up with the above solution which suggests that people sometimes have these thoughts that they wouldn't normally have, that they are ashamed of, or that they don't even necessarily know are racist. I wanted the image of the painter covering up the racial slur to be open to interpretation (or more specifically, to conversation). Is the painter thinking that and covering it up? Did someone else paint it to make it look like other people are thinking it? Is the painter secretly assuming that the graffiti-writer was black, and he stoops to racism out of anger? Am I, as the illustrator, slightly racist for even coming up with this concept? Either way, it's a tough question, and it was a challenging illustration..
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