Hand Painted Oil Paintings was an exploration of relationships between labor and authorship. I gleaned photos of mass produced drinking vessels from eBay listings, then painted individual works from each image, incorporating these images’ photography quirks as well as backgrounds that denoted ideas about the sellers attempts at, or apathy to, product marketing. After finishing the paintings, I photographed them in settings from my own environment, and then listed them for sale—again on eBay. When I listed my paintings, they became ten pieces of 41,657 other paintings listed as “Hand Painted Oil Paintings” and had become part of the global market of piecework things.

The cups, glasses, mugs, etc. that I chose were objects from my memory. At first this wasn’t my intention, but upon entering a search for “vintage coffee mug”, I found many of these things to be recognizable as items from my past. Among other items, the search produced a McDonald’s coffee mug commemorating the 1984 Olympics that my grandfather had owned, a smallish mug featuring the face of Santa Claus that my father had kept in a china cabinet, and a blue rimmed Margarita glass from a set that I had received as a housewarming gift that was never used.

A drinking vessel is an intermediary between hand and mouth, and therefore it serves as a connection between the exterior and interior of the body. The hand is social, and like the brick, a drinking vessel is made to fit the hand, as the hand is a tool. Selling these items secondhand, one considers the cup’s intimacy with the mouth which also makes it a very personal item, as the mouth is an “aperture of ingestion” and “work[s] to constitute the notion of the subject, the individual body, and ultimately the self”.1

1Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection , 1st paperback ed (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). p. 104.