20×200 Tuesday Edition: Mike Monteiro

Untitled by Mike Monteiro

This week’s 20×200 work on paper, a reproduction of an untitled painting by my pal Mike Monteiro, is a personal favorite of mine. The simple message, You’re Impossible, stands out in white in sea of thick black gouache brush strokes.

We’ve made 2 editions of the piece, both archival pigment prints on cotton rag paper. They’ll be on sale on our site at 2pm (EDT) today:

200 of the smaller prints (8.5″x11″) are available for $20 each.
20 of medium prints (13″x19″) are available for $200 each.

As always, the original painting (gouache on paper, 19″x24″) is available for purchase too. To inquire about purchasing the original, send an email to collector at 20×200 dot com.

Detail of Untitled by Mike Monteiro

It’s tough to see the handmade-ness of it looking at a .jpg online, but the prints themselves are velvety and gorgeous – you can see the texture of the brushstrokes, and the irregularity of the borders of the letters. All that aside, it’s just funny and true. All the people I like best are impossible at least some of the time – being able to tell them so with art delivers the message with love . I blogged it a while back for exactly that reason.

Mike has a documented a whole whole series of word paintings with his cell phone camera right here. Some paintings are considerably more offensive than others, but even the offensive ones are funny. They make me a little uncomfortable – I laugh, then there’s some politically-correct induced discomfort and then I’m frustrated with myself for being so predictably PC. This sort of reaction is something Mr. Monteiro enjoys skewering, in life and in art. Being a grouchy East Coast fella living in sunny San Francisco gives him ample opportunity to do so.

There’s more art coming to your Inbox tomorrow – we have a great photo queued up. I can’t wait to tell you all about it! You can fill your hours of anticipation between now and then by browsing the current inventory.