We’ve all experimented with the Etch A Sketch at some stage in our empty lives.As one of the most popular toys of the baby boomer generation, it’s something that we’ve all stumbled across in some backstairs bedroom or at some filthy children’s birthday party. Maybe somebody gave you one for Christmas when you were a kid, or you begged your parents to buy you one at the supermarket checkout.  Whatever your Etch A Sketch memories are formed upon, though, it was never something that we ever expected to gain mastery of. It was just something that was there and ostensibly always has been. Like a mountain, or the ocean or convenience stores…

Fast forward to 2008 then, the year of the rat, economic gloom and uncertainty, and you can’t help but wonder if all that came before was actually worth it. Whilst the rest of us have been attempting to buy into the system, convince ourselves that it works and everything is a.o.k, one man, known only as the Etchasketchist on his Flickr page, has been pushing the boundaries of dexterity and dedication to challenge the staid conventions of the art world with his Etch A Sketch delineations of the transient imagery of our times.  Nothing can summarise this point more clearly than the rendition of short-lived Heath Ledger as the Joker…In this epoch of materialist fugacity, in which all is brief and fleeting, perhaps the Etch A Sketchist is the only one who sees things as they really are. The imagery that he makes use of concerns itself with the fleeting nature of our culture and the people that live within it. Products, people, places, as we’re known and exist, we are all but dust (or aluminium powder) in the wind – waiting for the itching hands of time to shake us from its screen and away from eternity.

Whether he has realised it or not, the Etchasketchist is on to something, for he has found a metaphor for the times.
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Not quite sure where this image came from, but apparently it’s been floating around the web for ages. They should have used this aesthetic style when they made that crappy movie, it’s much more cinematic and would perhaps have justified dragging out a twenty two minute show into an hour and a half of tedium…