This new direction in my work--the portrait bags--is called This Is Not A Bag. It is a reference to the work of the thoughtful and provocative surrealist painter René Magritte. In 1929, he created a painting which he called The Treachery Of Images. The work shows a pipe on a flat background and written in a teacherly cursive below the pipe is the phrase "this is not a pipe." It may seem like a contradiction at first glance, but the image really isn't a pipe but the image of a pipe. As the artist reportedly said "just try to stuff it with tobacco!"
My portrait bags are in fact bags, not images of bags, and, as bags, they are supremely suff-able! At the same time, they are also paintings. I'm not digitally transferring an image onto the bag, but painting directly on them after the bag has already been sewn together.
This is my second portrait of Gabe. I created this one in 2006.