The canvas on which Atlas ended up started out as a painting called “Improv in C-minor”. Even though I did take a photograph of it, it was never complete in my mind and at one point I decided to try adding some translucent layers to it – completely ruined it, got mad at myself for messing it up and then just painted the whole thing red. That was the end of that.
The red canvas sat around for a while, then I doodled some black paint on it, and again ignored it for a couple of years. There were a few failed attempts to create something interesting with plain black on a red background, that ended up being nixed with a big black ball. Finally Atlas emerged, carrying the ball and the painting finally had a direction.
OK, so now here was Atlas carrying a big black ball. The question of what should go in the ball was posed to a few friends. My friend Leslie suggested a tree – that seemed promising, so I set to work. The green wasn’t showing up too well on the black, so I decided to chalk it out with white first, as I often do when starting to paint on a dark background. All of a sudden the branches started to look like neurons and so I began to work on a brain instead. The brain took some refining and re-working. I abandoned early attempts to make it translucent in favor of a more fleshy feel.
The name Atlas Drugged came from my neighbor at the time, Alex – they were literally the first words out of his mouth when he saw it, and it stuck.
