Based on the life of a poor black sharecropper’s son.
This is the start of my piece for the 100 FILMS exhibit presented by BlueLucy Gallery and the Sunscreen Film Festival. Each artist selected a movie to base their piece on. The movie I chose was The Jerk. Of course, I started my piece with a decorative border. Given the fact that this piece was based on a movie, I couldn’t do an ornate floral border. I chose to create the design using items from Navin R. Johnson’s life. The Twinkie was one of his favorite foods. The matches and paddle ball game were one of only a few things he “needed” when his life collapsed. The snails are a nod to the escargot scene, when he berates a restaurant waiter for allowing snails to cover his wife’s food. At the top, in all of its glory, is the Opti-grab, the invention that provided Navin’s success and eventually his bad fortune. The additional patterns and decorative elements in the border mimic designs on the carnival rides that surrounded Navin in the beginning of his journey to find his “special purpose”.
