Week 10 - Art Experience Assignment

Location: Laverne Krause Gallery, University of Oregon.
Artist: Brendan Newell
Piece: “For Your Protection (Doggystyle)”

This main focus of this drawing is a dog spewing out its bloody red intestines on a kitchen floor. The dogs gut has been filtered through a strainer and flushed out from a lidless blender. On the top of the black dog lies its human-like heart. Brendan Newell is trying to show his audience that the dog actually has a big heart and human beings unethically treat animals only as sources of food. The dog’s penis is replaced with an utter, which is symbolic of a cow’s use to human beings – to provide milk and other dairy products. In the background, there are refrigerators, microwaves, and ovens stacked on top of each other forming the shape of a mountain. These appliances are used to conserve and prepare animal products.
When Brendan Newell was a child, he liked to draw characters from comic books. Although he does not include any copyrighted figures, his work has a comic book style design. After reading a brief bio of Newell, I learned that he became interested in graffiti art as a teenager. In the backdrop of the drawing “For Your Protection (Doggystyle)”, there are etchings of different formations of a crackled print against a dull gray wall. These designs normally contain graffiti writing, but Newell’s decision to not include the street art gave the wall a broken-down, old school style. The kitchen is not upscale; rather it looks similar to a one bedroom apartment, usually the kind of housing an artist starts out with. The fine details are the nucleus that make the drawing special and provide art aficionados with a distinct sense of Newell’s artwork.