Paint By Numbers

Cigarette Butts, 2013. Depicts 139,000 cigarette butts, equal to the number of cigarettes that are smoked and discarded every 15 seconds in the US. 
Running the Numbers is a series of digital montages by artist Chris Jordan that looks at American culture in terms of raw numbers. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something across a finite length of time: e.g. the number of gallons of gasoline burned across the US each minute.
“My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone…” he wrote. “Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.”
Three Second Meditation, 2011. Depicts 9,960 mail order catalogs, equal to the average number of pieces of junk mail that are printed, shipped, delivered, and disposed of in the US every three seconds (and which none of us ever look at).
One more workshop left this year, and it starts on Sunday! Join me or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!