Bad Painting
Jay Rechsteiner
Bad Painting is a series of paintings I have been working on (since 2013) that I categorize as Bad Realism which is work that is not only bad in terms of style and craftsmanship but most importantly in terms of content. The 'badly' executed paintings represent the underlying bad reality of the actions depicted, i.e. the paintings are as bad as the world they depict. The paintings are based on true events and are an investigation into the relativity of evil and everyone's potential to commit evil crimes.
Although I don't consider my paintings to belong to the popular genre of Bad Painting, I have always been fascinated by the freedom of 'bad' painters such as Joan Brown or Neil Jenney. I use the term Bad Painting as the title of this specific series of work. 'Badly' painting doesn't only set me free from the constraints of 'good' and 'decent' technique but also gives me a feeling of everything goes/everything-is-fine.
Bad Painting 143: The husband is about to hit his wife with a belt in the face.
Bad Painting 164: An angry father is yelling at his daughter and telling her that she is stupid and will never achieve anything in life.
Bad Painting 178: A dad is filming his daughter cry with blood in her mouth after losing a tooth. The footage has more than 160 million views on his YouTube vlog.
Bad Painting 181: One-year old girl battered to death by mum's boyfriend is lying dying with fractures to the skull, a ruptured liver and other injuries on a mattress while her mum and her boyfriend are playing video games. He poisoned the child with a deadly dose of codeine to cover up the beating.
Bad Painting 180: A boyfriend is trying to throw his girlfriend out of the window after a man liked her Facebook photo. (She is pregnant, but they don't know.)
To see the full project, please follow this link.