kilroy

A thought crept into my mind last night. And if I’m to be completely honest, it wasn’t for the first time.

It was maybe a couple of hours after I’d sold another two tees of this design:
Welcome To Paradise

It’s my most popular design (by a long shot), and I guess I always suspected it would be.

Before I get into what it got me thinking about I might lift the curtain a little on what went into it becoming a design. If memory serves, it didn’t take very long and I did a fair chunk of it on company time (it’s OK, I don’t work there any more!) and the chief inspiration was that I had an interview with a surf label the next day and didn’t really have a lot of surf-y work in my folio.

So now that I’ve really busted down that fourth wall, I will point out that it was an idea I had been kicking around in my head for a while and so, really, the job interview was more the motivation to actually produce it, rather than the actual inspiration. Hopefully I’ve managed to claw back some artistic integrity…!

Right, in the interests of meandering my way vaguely toward my point, I’ll state something which may or may not be the obvious: it’s a piss-take. I am an atheist. I was brought up in a vaguely quasi-religious environment and went to a uniting Church school where I went through the motions faith-wise, but really focussed and had impressed upon me the importance of just being a good person irrespective any religious agenda. Which I think is nicer, but that’s a whole other debate.

Anyway, my point is this: when I designed that tee I was making fun – not in a mean way – of religion, specifically Christianity and Catholicism. And if you want to get a bit deeper, maybe with the message that the ‘paradise’ of ‘heaven’ should be something we try to create on earth.

So when this whole ridiculous World Youth Day nonsense started up, with a bunch of people being labeled the unannoyables, and means set to enforce that were brought in, I thought I’d put my annoying two cents in and I added WYD and World Youth Day to the tags for this design. Possibly as a result, there has been a bit of an increase in views and a few sales. Which is nice for me, obviously.

But what I was wondering was, is it the sort of thing that is $5500-worth of annoying? Are the people viewing/buying it seeing it from the same perspective as I am? If people have bought it for WYD, are they on the free speech side or the pilgrim side of the polarised debate? (I say polarised because I know that there are pilgrims who don’t want freedom of expression quashed and probably some freedom-of-expressionists who aren’t out to annoy anyone.)

After all it’s just a picture of Jesus, isn’t it? Can it be considered offensive? Jesus (and I’m talking in historical terms) probably experienced his share of sunsets and heck, there might have been some palm trees about. Looking at it now, it seems so ambiguous to me, like it’s just a bunch of semiotic signifiers waiting for you to come and hang your ideologies on it.

Anyway, I still think it’s funny but I’d love to get some other perspectives on this. Any religious types care to contribute their thoughts?