Tudor

Ed Paschke made social subcultures his dominant subject matter during the 1960s and 1970's. In 1976 he began painting figures in increasingly larger scales, depicted invariably in flamboyant psychedelic costumes. Sometimes he based them on print media imagery, sometimes on real people. The same year he made both the color and black versions of Tudor, redrawing the stone for each edition, and he painted Adria, an uncommissioned portrait of Chicago art historian and art critic Dennis Adrian in almost identical costume and backdrop, but in blues and greens.

Paschke used theatrical backdrops, dynamic patterning, and exaggerated clothing fashions to define images of the human body so impossibly mannered that they are rendered grotesque. The figures pose unselfconsciously, sometimes confrontationally, and serve as the armature for complex explorations of the nature of visual imagery and symbolism, as well as issues of painterly construction and composition. But Paschke's edgy, intense subjects are calculated to disturb and provoke. By staging a shock to the human sensory apparatus with a palette of lurid electric colors and bizarre photo-realistic subjects, he aimed to implicate viewers in the not-so-innocent aspects of looking, as an act of rubbernecking, gawking, and peeping.