Fast Food Fatality 1979

Don Ivan Punchatz made this illustration, Fast Food Fatality, probably in oil, and I am wondering if he had painters like Norman Rockwell in mind? All those reds, greens, yellows and blues. How the painting came to be must have taken weeks, months even. Layers and layers of planning. I sympathise with him. It’s not easy! He must have felt like a conductor, orchestrating the whole scene. It's easy to overlook the material aspect of illustration like this. The paint here is applied pretty thinly, with the intention to communicate a clear narrative. But what a narrative! That hand with the gun. It’s hard to know for sure what it means but that is okay. Paintings don’t have to solve a problem, they can be a space for thinking. Punchatz’s is a conversation that extends back through art history and helps us think about the role of painting as an embodied expression. I am glad he made it.