All the Cokes are Good

These three paintings (pictured here side by side and separately below) will be on view at the Douglas Udell Gallery in Edmonton at their Christmas show on Saturday, December 11.   Each of the paintings will sell for $1100.00.  I first got the idea to paint Coke cans after I had researched Warhol's Campbell's soup cans for my "history of still life" series in 2008.

The image to the left is one that I painted in my own style in 2008 - a re-interpretation or reconfiguration of the iconic image.  Warhol's version with the torn label is an image that has stuck with me since then.  Maybe Warhol is more remembered for the soup cans, but the coke bottles are also worth revisiting.  This Coke bottle recently went for $35 million U.S.  Warhol's well-known quotation regarding Coke:  


"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."


I listen to CBC while I paint.  I begin working at about 5 or 5:30 am and at that time the BBC is on.  I heard a show recently about how Coke is the most widely distributed product in the world.  In the remotest parts of Bangladesh and Zambia, Coke is sold.  Many places without electricity use gas generators to run cooling units for the beverages.  So - Coke and World Health officials have started putting small health packages inside crates of Coke which are transported on bicycles and by pack animals.  The packets include anti-malerial and anti-dehydration medicine and other basic medicines which help mostly children fight diseases and sickness in the developing world.  It's strange to think that a beverage which is basically sugar water can be so powerful.

I've painted three versions of Coke cans to date, though of course there are more.  The crumpled cans are interesting because they create, visually, a kind of resistance to reading them.  You have to fight a little to recognize them.  In my mind, the crumpling also turns them into artifacts, rather than just pristine objects.  They've been consumed and discarded.  The wear and tear and violence performed on them reflect, to me, part of their journey around the globe.  Of course, it's our North American culture that focuses on the zero calories, and the zero caffeine.

The Coke Zero is the can I was least familiar with.  The highly reflective black ended up being very interesting to paint with all the different tones.

The red unifies all three cans.  "Coke" red is a combination of cadmium red light and cadmium red medium with my Winsor & Newton colours, with burnt umber and lamp black in the shadows.  All paint manufacturers have a different cadmium red medium, I have found, ranging from almost orange, to a brick red, so it would depend what brand you use.

Warhol said, a Coke is a Coke.  True.  But what I'm trying to get at through my realist depictions of this mass produced beverage that so many people drink worldwide, is something unique. The crumpling and treatment of each can is subtly different.  The letters in the logo are twisted and distorted in particular ways.  The cans are all made of aluminum, but the point at which they collapse or crumple, are distressed and give in to the force applied - each of these is unique to the can, and in the painting.

The kind of realist painting that I'm trying to achieve is interested in this kind of seeing.  I'm not interested in painting the potential uniformity in things, but rather in bringing those subtle differences into view, so that we may look again at those objects we see every day.