Trenton Doyle Hancock: One of America’s Greatest African American Artists
In the year 2000 Trenton Doyle became the youngest artist ever to be includes in a Whitney Biennial (world-renowned showcase for recent American art, typically by young and lesser-known artists. The Whitney show is generally regarded as one of the leading shows in the art world, often setting or leading trends in contemporary art� http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Biennial).
Even though his art was showcased there and at other prestigious shows, such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, his works still seemed to be drastically out of place. Hancock’s paintings, prints, and drawings create the look of a collage. They tell stories of mythical creatures that are normally half-animal and half plant like.
Trenton’s work us a combination of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and “Bad Art”. Bad Art is an art movement following on from pop art and rendering paintings in an expressionistic style of big, heavily laden brushwork so that the sharp edges of cartoon work common in pop paintings are replaced by big, clumsy-looking childlike impressions of people and objects in intentionally banal compositions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_art).
The Painting of his I would like to discuss is entitled Java Bean Head the Painting is done in Graphite on Acrylic Paper and was done in 2002. This painting is a combination of bright colors, strong lines, and unique imagery. The painting itself appears to be a small coffee bean head mounted on a round body that is black and white surrounded by very vivid colored flowers.
I believe that the artist is trying to demonstrate that beauty is a relative thing and that true beauty is only really determined by the person describing it. Trenton uses items that are normally consider beautiful i.e. flowers and combines them with not so beautiful things like a coffee bean an makes a image that is beautiful, intriguing and thought provoking.
