Irrational Exuberance Painting by Carolyn Oberst - as part of the series on arts by GeoBeats.

I am Carolyn Oberst and this painting is called Irrational Exuberance. So the inspiration for this piece were these two Humpty Dumpty dolls that I happened to find just around the time that the economy was collapsing. This Humpty Dumpty and a female Humpty Dumpty, so for me this became Mr. & Mrs. Dumpty had a great fall so it seemed like the perfect timing for a painting like this. I started this with the same way that I usually work where I do a simply drawing first, a line drawing with some collage that is the basis for the idea, and then I take this, I xerox it, I cut it up and I end up with a more complicated composition.

So here I have used wood in different thicknesses from a quarter inch up to an inch thick, cut the pieces out on a band saw based on the collage drawing that I did, and then I paint the pieces separately and you can see there is so much detail. The background is painted separately and then everything gets screwed together from behind. So I feel that this piece really is a statement about what is going on right now for people, the excitement of our lifestyle but the collapse and the explosion of what is going on in the economy.