First Post

I have a confession, I have never been on Facebook.... weird I know. I have never been a fan of a computer algorithm analyzing my activity to determine how best to present information to me, or to market towards me... I get enough of it through google lol. Steemit, after researching it is a community I want to share my ideas with as I feel this audience is ready to talk about ideas rather than trends.
I am a lot of different people but I am going to share with you one aspect of who I am and that is a painter. Hope you like what I am going to post.

What is intrinsic value? What is Money?
“I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, "Well, what do you love most?" That's how I started painting money.” – Andy Warhol
When Warhol said this he was accurate in that the images he was working with were indeed money; it was a U.S. currency backed by gold, in fact the world’s reserve currency, and the straight forward representation reinforces that reading. However, Warhol made this statement in the mid-1960’s, but in 1971 the rules of money changed in the U.S., leading to the financial crisis the world has now. The money became currency; gold no longer backed the paper but rather it was now backed by debt. It became a fiat currency, valued only by government decree and intrinsically only worth the paper it’s printed on. The world has been participating in an economic experiment as the result of this decoupling, gold from the dollar. This experiment is beginning to unwind.
The intrinsic value that the artist brings to the work is labour, skill with process and materials, an aesthetic vocabulary, and the conceptual meaning a piece of art has through its originality. Even though this series of work has at its core a print-making language, like the increased printing of U.S. currency, I have used print-making in this series as a mark-making device and not a means of numbered reproduction. Every piece is original and contains gesture and aesthetic decisions unlike a reproducible print-making process.
Instead of presenting the currency straight forward like Warhol, I am interested in trying to communicate the over-printing of currency that distorts the original intention. A gestural application of paint onto the piece is about an erasure much like the Keynesian economic system the U.S. is engaged in that controls the expansion and contraction of currency in the system, expansion being the operative word. Since 2008, the world has undergone drastic monetary expansion, stimulus, bail-outs, and bail-in’s, the Libor rate rigging scandal, stock market and commodity market manipulation, record fines for banks’ illegal activity with no criminal liability (Too Big Too Fail = Too Big Too Jail) , stock bubbles, pump and dumps, Bitcoin, Abenomics, Grexit, The world exiting the US dollar, raise of the AIIB Investment Bank and a general distrust of the banking sector. This is all worth talking about.