Recurring Themes
Major recurring themes of Eric Millikin's art are portrait paintings, the supernatural, and optical illusions. In his series "Hollywood Witch Trials", Millikin paints portraits of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan based on their crime mug shots, stylizes them to look like witches, and combines them with excerpts from transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials. His "American Mayhem" series uses optical illusions that transform American flags into cityscapes filled with monsters, and incorporates ambigram calligraphy that reads when the paintings are hung upside down. He often creates self-portraits showing him falling prey to tragic death or engaging in star-crossed love affairs. For example, he is depicted engaged in activities such as being killed by vampire hunters, being eaten by a dinosaur, and sawing off his own arm then replacing it with a zombie's. His artwork often involves supernatural creatures, like Fetus-X, a psychic zombie fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde who may or may not be Millikin's missing Siamese twin or his clone from an alternate timeline or dimension.
Read more about this topic: Eric Monster Millikin
Famous quotes related to recurring themes:
“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)