Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Paintings Convey The Ongoing Battle Between The Mounds And The Vegans
Trenton Doyle Hancock‘s work really interests me; not only his style but the single idea that underlies his entire oeuvre – the battle between good and evil or, in Hancock’s case, the ongoing fight between ‘The mounds’, which he describes in vibrant and colourful motifs and symbols and ‘The Vegans’ which are permanently confined to a black and white underground world.
This ongoing saga in Hancock’s work contributes to a prolific output of paintings, sculptures, prints and performances that portray the birth, life, death, afterlife and dreams of the mounds who are constantly under attack by the malign forces of the vegans. His work, heavily influenced by the history of painting – and especially Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism – gives him a platform from which to subvert the formal traditions of painting such as colour, form and language and, like all good artists before him, gives him the ability to find new spaces, points of departure in which he can create new characters, develop sub-plots and convey symbolic meaning including the often used Biblical stories which have been a mainstay for artists throughout history.
I love his work and it wasn’t surprising to find out that Hancock is one of the youngest ever artists to have been included in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions. And just on a note about the Mounds and Vegans they have been explained as thus:
the mounds were created thousands of years ago, when an ape man masturbated into a field of flowers while the Vegans were responsible for the death of The Legend, the oldest of a plant-like species known as mounds. The concept of a vegan is based largely on ‘a vegan’ however, a vegan is not a person who doesn’t eat meat; rather, such a person is a ‘vegan vessel’, the victim of a vegan that has taken residence in his stomach.
Via Beautiful Decay
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