Ink on Paper • 12″x12″ • Now Showing

Formed during a recent printmaking course, this printet will be featured in an upcoming two-person gig. (more…)

Hello, my name is Todd Marrone and I’m a quoteaholic. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been infatuated and inspired by bite-sized nuggets of wisdom. Enjoy a cluster of my favorites:

Famous People

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
-Albert Einstein

“There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
-Pablo Picasso

“How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun.”
-Vincent Van Gogh (more…)

All the World Cafe Live’s a Stage

I recently shared this case of Miss-fakin’-identity via First Person Arts’ StorySlam at World Cafe Live.

In 29 short years, MTV has ruined music, television, New Jersey and birthday parties. That’s literally a bold statement, allow me to build my case:

Exhibit A) Sure, image, marketing and visual appearance have always had their places in pop music… but it wasn’t until the popularization of the music video that those things completely eclipsed musicianship. Janis Joplin would NOT have a record contract in a post-MTV world, nor would Justin Bieber in a pre-MTV world.

Exhibit B) The first season of The Real World aired in 1992. Arguably, the series’s success was instrumental in America’s reality TV explosion. It is the illegitimate father of The Simple Life, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, The Hills and any number of little person, human litter-raising and/or cake decorating docu-crapperies. The majority of reality TV programs celebrate the worst of humanity and grant celebrity status to dismal people for doing dispicable things.

Exhibit C) New Jersey has long had its problems but Bon Jovi and Jersey Shore is a one-two punch from which the garden state may never recover. A conservative estimate is that 80% of all Jerseyites idolize and/or emmulate one or both.

Exhibit D) My Super Sweet Sixteen taught us that a birthday party isn’t a celebratory gathering of loved ones nor ritualistic rite of passage… it’s a pissing match for rich people.

Case closed. The floor is open for debate.

In the home where I grew up, on the inside of the bathroom cabinet door, were two crudely drawn boots along with the phrase:

“WE DON’T MAKE BOOTS HERE”

Why someone would scrawl that there has plagued me for thirty years. Perhaps “plagued” is too strong a word.

A Bunch of Jung

An eagle-eyed pal spotted this piece of artwork dangling in the background of everyone’s favorite train wreck du jour. It’s not one of mine but shares the composition, subject, palette and aesthetic of much of my recent work. Should I chalk it up to collective subconscious or sue for custody of the kids?

A few years ago, the Mrs. and I donned backpacks and scooted our backsides across Europe. One evening, on a train ride through Germany, I had a German beer and Dramamine-fueled epiphany. Luckily, my wife captured the bloated bloviation on film.

I’ve transcribed it for your reading pleasure, prepare to be underwhelmed:

“Come here… I get it… standing here, drinking my beer, looking out the window in a train from Prague to Frankford… I get it.

All that stuff that we see out there from the window seems like unimportant, little values and shapes and sizes and colours and blips and blops… large pockets of dark, some of which have been slightly industrialized or settled, some of which have been left completely natural… but it means nothing. It’s just kind of a backdrop. It’s the ambient noise and the ambient visuals that go on in the background of a train ride.

BUT, how many times have we found ourselves, sitting in a small town or city… or in the countryside and we see a train go by? …and that is the ambient noise of our afternoon… so we’re now impeding on their peacefulness.

So, we are taking a single line, from point A to point B, and all we see are the Infinitesimals and complexities of life, lower and higher, for hundreds of thousands of miles, stretched out on either side… and we sit by a little train window and look out… and they are next to nothing to us and we are next to nothing to them… except for a little yellowish light that stays still as we whiz by or a yellowish light that whizzes by as they stay still.  Get it?”

A brain is a terrible thing to wash.

Every “system” should have an expiration date.

As a service to e-voyeurs everywhere, I’ve recently taken up the self-indulgent hobby of twittering. In addition to keeping strangers abreast of my geographical whereabouts and pseudointellectual musings, I intend to post guerrilla art alerts. Stay tuned via the sidebar of toddmarrone.com or follow me on Twitter.