St Patrick's Day in a Can
With the possible exception of my pro-Ukraine piece, this is my first overtly political piece. If you know a little bit about art, you'll know that all art is political – it can't be anything else. For example if you paint a beautiful landscape, there's the implication that the landscape in question is important in some way (in your, the artist's, opinion), so it should probably be preserved rather than turned into a building site (a political position on the environment). If you paint or draw people from a particular group (eg women, Irish people, young people, etc etc), there's also the implication that people in that group are important in some way, but depending on the art it may be difficult to work out from just a single piece, whether the artist is saying something positive about their importance (hopefully! unless, that is, the group is despots & dictators, or similar) or whether they are expressing their prejudices about them (hopefully not!). By looking at multiple artworks by the same artist however, we can begin to see a pattern emerge.
There's no need to look for any patterns in the above piece, however, because I'll explain what it means. Basically it's a critique about what I see as the crass way in which St Patrick's Day is celebrated by many people and corporations. By using the pop art style, I'm referencing how tacky and commercialised the celebrations have become in many cases. The title (and label on the can in the second panel) is a reference to how easy many people think it is to don a bit of Irishness on St Patrick's Day (as easy as opening a can, in which everything is already prepared for you) despite their ignorance of the fact that they are appropriating Irish culture and/or perpetuating offensive and demeaning stereotypes. This, however, is not to criticise anyone in this thread who may have used such stereotypes because the portrayal of negative Irish stereotypes on and around St Patrick's Day is so widespread, that many people don't understand that these are offensive to Irish people.
Finally if you're wondering what “ACOHT AA.4” means, it's deep – very deep! Either that or it means I was too tired to finish editing this piece. I already edited the somewhat AI-garbled text in 2 of the other panels (1 of them was already perfect), but still being largely incompetent when it comes to using my editing software it took me forever and a day to get the text decent in these 2 panels, so 'Acoht' will have to remain 'Acoht'...
Apologies for this, but I can sometimes be slow to respond to PMs. Unless my reply to you is very simple, eg “Thanks for that!”, it may take about a week. Thanks for your understanding, patience and strawberry daiquiris (especially the daiquiris!)
10 minutes has passed and first to volunteer gets to reward - HogwartsExpress
