I love Scooby-Doo. And I agreed to show paintings at the library when I had exactly zero paintings to show. There are always silly little ideas for pictures swimming around in my head, but I didn’t have a plan. Some people might have paused, and thought about what they wanted to do for an exhibition, but instead I decided to just paint something.
One of my favorite visuals from the original series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, is the villain known as the Spooky Space Kook. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been thinking about doing a large canvas divided into quadrants, with identical versions of the Space Kook in different colors - like Andy Warhol.
But I wanted to start a little smaller, so I decided to place the Space Kook into a classic 1980s double-exposure picture. My first painting for the library show was The Spooky Space Kook Visits the Sears Portrait Studio.
Connections:
There is another overt reference to Scooby-Doo in Lava Monster in the Morning, and the double-exposure portrait style is revisited in Mother’s Circus Lion Visits the Sears Portrait Studio. Another classic 1980s portrait style can be seen in Meat Monster Sophomore Yearbook Photo.
