ON THE MAKING OF ONE-MINUTE CEREAL BOX LANDSCAPES

It struck me, one morning, a half dozen years ago, while waiting for my then teenage son to come down to breakfast, that the bowls of cereal shown on cereal boxes looked rather landscape-like, and could probably be easily assisted into becoming convincing, if possibly parodic, landscape paintings. To that end, I began to cut out the front panels of the empty boxes and, with a brush heavily loaded with acrylic, swipe a quick horizon of sea across the bottoms of the cereal piles, and rapidly swirl in some sky overhead. The results surprised me.

These painting actions did indeed generate landscapes—quite remarkably convincing ones, I felt, though they were inevitably generic landscapes, vaguely reminiscent of somewhere or other (some evoked the prairies, others were inescapably, archetypally maritime) and were never paintings of any particular place. Much of what interested me about them had to do with their no-fail qualities: it seemed quite impossible to make a really bad one. And, curiously, the faster I made them, the better they always were. None of them ever took more than a minute to make (most took less). Making them was the next best thing to being in a sort of preconscious, procedural trance, a state of unknowing that inevitably precluded any of my much-practiced critical faculties cutting in and prompting me to try to do better—or more.